Questions tagged [waves]
Waves are disturbances that propagate through space and time. Classically, they travelled through a medium, disturbing the particles but not changing their mean position. Electromagnetic waves/particle-waves need no medium; they are disturbances in their respective fields.
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Restoring force in wave motion and transfer of forces
I am trying to understand about the forces that one body generates a force and gives it to the other one and receives a reaction, yes, these are not a cause effect pair as what sir Newton said and ...
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How do we decide whether a vibration of a solid object is longitudinal or transverse, when the object is not a 1D rod or 1D string?
In my understanding, a vertical needle that moves straight up and down should be a longitudinal vibration, because according to textbooks' definition, the motion is along the needle’s rest axis.
But ...
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Longitudinal waves in a tin can telephone
What kind of wave travels true the string of a tin can telephone? Most places say that its a longitudinal wave, if that's the case then why when the string is tensioned the message gets louder?
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What do you call the greatest common divisor of each frequencies of interfering waves?
For simplicity, let there be two nice waves in the form Acos(wt) +Bsin(wt) interfering in a 2-D plane. From my understanding, a wave is considered to have finished one cycle when it goes back to its ...
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Fixed vs free ends in 1D standing waves
In introductory physics courses one often discusses standing waves on a string with two fixed ends. A standard experimental demonstration of this is given here.
My problem is that in such a ...
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Definition of a wave [duplicate]
My teacher taught me that any function f which satisfies $\frac{\partial}{\partial t}(\frac{\partial f}{\partial t}) = v^2 \frac{\partial}{\partial x}(\frac{\partial f}{\partial x})$ and that value of ...
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How does the usual depiction of an electromagnetic wave fit with depictions as a water style wave? [closed]
For eg. in the 2 slit experiment the interference pattern
is due to a wave like on the surface of water which spreads out radially, and this is the case even with one photon. How does the linear ...
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What is the relationship between a "single pulsed spherical wave of light," and the "sinuisoidal vacuum" E+M wave eqn. solutions?
This question is purely conceptual and has bugged me for awhile.
When we construct the light cone, we often think about "sending out" a single spherical light wave, sourced by a single pulse ...
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Does electromagnetic energy disappear during a single destructive interference of finite pulses?
I am considering interference between finite electromagnetic pulses, not continuous plane waves.
Pulse 1 travels along the +x direction with a transverse electric field
$$\mathbf{E}_1 = +\hat{\mathbf{...
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Why doesn’t the Fraunhofer diffraction prediction match what we observe with wide single slits in reality?
In experiments with a single slit (using ordinary light or laser light), when the slit width is very large compared to the wavelength , I observe that the bright region on the screen has a sharp ...
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Determining depth of seabeds near shore using waves characteristics
Shoaling wave height increases as waves come closer to the beach. By using this property of the wave, it is possible to find the depth of the seabed close to the beach(between when the shoaling of the ...
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Sound waves, speed of sound, pressure, not an ideal gas [duplicate]
This may be an incredibly basic question, yet i am unable to understand as why speed of sound is independent of pressure. as according to me as i understand when increasing the pressure , density ...
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Passage of plane wave from a non-orthogonal wall with hole
It is famous point that if a perfect plane wave passes from a tiny hole in a orthogonal wall (mathematical wall! with almost zero thickness) to its direction, behind the wall we see a symmetric ...
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Do Tokamaks lose a significant amount of energy through fast magnetosonic waves?
From the linearized ideal MHD equations in a uniform plasma, one can derive a dispersion relation showing two types of magnetosonic waves: fast and slow. The fast waves are able to propagate across ...
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Why are solitons reluctant to disperse their energy?
Can somebody explain in words alone why solitons survive in water so long? Are they moving with low friction through the surrounding water imparting little energy to it?
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