How does a whip break the sound barrier? (Slow Motion Shockwave formation) - Smarter Every Day 207

Point taken. Thanks for the explanation, that helped me a achieve a deeper understanding & blew my mind. This animation of a tachyon goes well with your explanation: link If you look for it, you can observe this effect in the high speed Schlieren footage of a whip in this video ▶ this video (you can skip to around 8 minutes) It starts to disturb the air, then the shockwave overtakes the disturbance, so you can observe them in the flipped order if you're in the sound universe.

Fun fact, you can accelerate an almost-everyday object to supersonic speeds: whip tip [1,2]. 1. link 2. ▶ this video (very much recommended)

As mentioned by others, the photography technique looks like (and apparently is a software enabled variant of) Schlieren photography. This(1) is a neat example of an old school Schlieren set up capturing shockwave formation during whip cracks. I highly recommend it. (1) ▶ this video