Similarly, you may ask, how do you crack a whip?
"The crack of a whip comes from a loop traveling along the whip, gaining speed until it reaches the speed of sound and creates a sonic boom," Goriely says. He notes that even though some parts of the whip travel at greater speeds, "it is the loop itself that generates the sonic boom."
Also, does a whip hurt? There is no evidence to suggest that whipping does not hurt. Whips can cause bruising and inflammation, however, horses do have resilient skin. That is not to say that their skin is insensitive.
Correspondingly, what speed does a whip crack?
What makes a whip crack is the tip exceeding the speed of sound. The crack is a miniature "sonic boom" just like the one an airplane creates when it exceeds the speed of sound.
Does whipping a towel break the sound barrier?
For this to be the case, the tip of the towel must travel faster than sound. We have used high-speed photographic methods to show that the tip of the towel does indeed break the sound barrier. An experiment reported by Bern- stein et al. ' in 1958 showed that the tip of a cracked bull whip exceeds the speed of sound.