Quote Originally Posted by Gandalf_The_Grey
lets just say my finger was strong enough to move the bar a few inches in one quick push.

If an observer looked at the whole bar from afar, would he see a bar with a traveling bend moving through it like a wave? How could that even work?
Yes... if you give the bar a huge push with you superman's finger, it would bend the bar, and this bend would travel exactly like a wave, cause it is one. Mechanical pertubations are sound waves into the material. We only dont see this waves in the everyday world because they travel very fast (some 3 miles/sec in the iron), so when we push a bar, the wave travels almost instantly to the other side. But if you had a long, long bar of rubber, this effect would be more noticeable, as the speed of the sound in the rubber is very low, so you would see the wave traveling through it.
Coelho Reviewed by Coelho on . I need somebody knowledgeable in physics So I have a little quandary that's been on my mind (on and off) for a good while now, hoping somebody can explain this. Now as we all know, the speed of light is currently considered the "universal speed limit", the fastest matter or energy can travel. So we'll keep that in mind. So, imagine that I have an iron bar (we'll just take away gravity for convenience) that's so long, it stretches from one end of the galaxy to the other. By this I mean the longest end to the other longest end, Rating: 5