1 / 8

Waves & Light from Arons Ch 9

Waves & Light from Arons Ch 9. A brief summary by Carl J. Wenning. Waves. Concrete experiences are essential to conceptual understanding More complex wave phenomena (e.g. light and sound) can be best understood via analogy. Teaching Mechanical Waves.

Download Presentation

Waves & Light from Arons Ch 9

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Waves & Lightfrom Arons Ch 9 A brief summary by Carl J. Wenning

  2. Waves • Concrete experiences are essential to conceptual understanding • More complex wave phenomena (e.g. light and sound) can be best understood via analogy

  3. Teaching Mechanical Waves • Employ the Slinky, strings, ropes, springs, and ripple tanks • Wave phenomena and terminology: • Distinguish wave speed from particle speed • Use graphs to represent particle motion • Distinguish transverse from longitudinal waves • Carefully consider reflections of waves

  4. Surface Waves in Shallow Water • When depth, D, is small in relation to wavelength, l, the wave speed is given by: • Note that small surface waves travel faster in deeper water. • Speed changes with depth, but wavelength does not which implies that frequency? (Is there a parallel with light in a refractive medium, n=c/v?) • Standard wave formula by analogy: • d = vt : l = vT = v/f

  5. Standing Waves • Merseinne’s laws: • Frequency = f(tension, length, mass/unit length) • Fundamental and harmonics • Musical scales

  6. Sound • Wave as sound analogy goes only so far: • Frequency does not equal pitch • Volume does not equal amplitude • but, it still works for: • Interference • Diffraction

  7. Image formation • Plane mirrors • Diverging and converging lenses • Concave and convex mirrors • Virtual and real images • Ray tracings

  8. Misconceptions about Light • How we see a la Parmenides • Filters are seen as adding color to white light

More Related