- #1
Gaijinja
- 6
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Ok, first I'll mention that I'm completely new to these forms (first post) and all that jazz. Anyway, on to the subject of the post.
In my physics class (high school level only, mind you) we were doing a lab with long slinkies to show the properties of waves and such. Our teacher wanted us to try and measure the amplitude of a moving wave, both transversal and longitudinal, mainly to prove how hard it is. My lab partners and I discovered that if one person bunched up a lot of the slinky at one end (effectively making the slinky more taught) while the person on the other end of the slinky generated a wave of either type and then the person with the bunched up slinky let go, the wave effectively froze in place while the slinky sprung back to a less deformed position, allowing us a couple of seconds to quickly measure amplitude. When we showed our little trick to the teacher, he was quite impressed, and said that he was completely unfamiliar with that phenomena in waves. He claimed that we might be able to do some research on the subject, and get it published in a small science journal or something similar. Now, as much as I would like to get something published, I realize that this probably isn't a new discovery, however, I've been searching on google for awhile, and have not run across anything explaining this phenomena. I have read a bunch about Standing Waves, where two waves interfere in such a way as to create specific nodes that don't move. This, however, is not the phenomena we saw.
So, after that long introduction, my question is what is this phenomena and what is the math associated with it?
In my physics class (high school level only, mind you) we were doing a lab with long slinkies to show the properties of waves and such. Our teacher wanted us to try and measure the amplitude of a moving wave, both transversal and longitudinal, mainly to prove how hard it is. My lab partners and I discovered that if one person bunched up a lot of the slinky at one end (effectively making the slinky more taught) while the person on the other end of the slinky generated a wave of either type and then the person with the bunched up slinky let go, the wave effectively froze in place while the slinky sprung back to a less deformed position, allowing us a couple of seconds to quickly measure amplitude. When we showed our little trick to the teacher, he was quite impressed, and said that he was completely unfamiliar with that phenomena in waves. He claimed that we might be able to do some research on the subject, and get it published in a small science journal or something similar. Now, as much as I would like to get something published, I realize that this probably isn't a new discovery, however, I've been searching on google for awhile, and have not run across anything explaining this phenomena. I have read a bunch about Standing Waves, where two waves interfere in such a way as to create specific nodes that don't move. This, however, is not the phenomena we saw.
So, after that long introduction, my question is what is this phenomena and what is the math associated with it?