A new wave of acoustics

In 1946, Richard Feynman, giving a contributed paper at a meeting of the American Physical Society, remarked that the allotted time was not long enough for him to read his abstract (it was a peculiarly long one), but only enough for him to point out the errors in it. In a similar vein, modern acoustics is so broad that the space allowed here is scarcely enough to reprint the PACS classification of the subject, let alone to instruct or entertain. Acoustics today is a festival of the applications of physics, both theoretical and experimental. We must therefore restrict ourselves to a sampling of topics, ranging from acoustical devices as ancient as the guinea pig's ear (figure 1) to others as modern as the electron‐acoustic microscopic (figure 2).