From Malcolm Shute
The result that is reported in “Sound can leap across a vacuum after all” (2 October, p 12) is interesting but not quite as astounding as you make it out to be. It is, after all, an electric field that is doing the leaping, not a sound wave per se. The inventor Guglielmo Marconi, among others, demonstrated the feasibility of this in the 1890s.
The editor writes:
• Indeed, it has long been possible to transmit sound across a vacuum using radio waves, but this requires a radio transmitter on one side and a receiver on the other. What was not obvious until now is that even without any radio equipment or radio waves, sound will naturally jump between piezoelectric crystals separated by a vacuum, because the electric field of one crystal disturbs the other crystal across the gap.
Vaucluse, France
