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

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]

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

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.