1) Oscillation
2) They can be added together without an increase in energy.
On the chalk board Professor Gleeson wrote some other properties of waves on the board.
- Crests and Troughs
- Waves refraction
- lambda = V/F
- Space and Time
- Energy!
- Transverse + Longitudinal
- Polarized (check out the blog picture)
We did discuss all of the proprieties above in class. However, I am only going to concentrate on the ones that interest me (OK...the ones that I understand the best!)
Of course the concept that I best understand is the relationship between the wavelength and frequency of a wave. This is a simple but fundamental equation to understand. It is simply:
^ = V/F , were ^=wavelength v=speed of the wave, and f= frequency
In the picture below three concepts above can be seen visually:
I also want to talk about polarized light. In a wave of light there are random oscillations of the electric field. When light waves oscillate in a particular way they are said to be polarized. Furthermore, when the light waves oscillates on a particular plane (x,y,z) it is said to be plane-polarized light. One use of plane polarized light is to determine the stereo-chemistry of an organic compound.
Furthermore, we also learned about refractive index. Each compound or substance has a refractive index. This number tells us how light waves, or sound waves travels though the compound. When waves travel though a compound they slow down. An animation of this concept can be seen below:
Sources:
(1) http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/radar/about/phase_changes.shtml
(2) http://au.encarta.msn.com/media_461531346/polarized_light.html
(3) http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PETROLGY/GENLIGHT.HTM
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snells_law_wavefronts.gif
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