Waves, Acoustics & Oscillations
The physics of things that repeat and things that travel: pendulums and springs, strings and sound, resonance, and the mathematics that breaks any signal into simple waves.
Waves and oscillations are the branch of physics that studies periodic motion about an equilibrium and the propagation of disturbances that carry energy through a medium or a field without bulk transport of matter; acoustics is its application to sound.
What this covers
Almost every area of physics contains oscillators and waves: a pendulum, an electric circuit, a vibrating molecule, a sound wave, light, and the quantum wavefunction itself. The same mathematics, built around simple harmonic motion and the wave equation, describes all of them. This domain covers oscillations and resonance, the general properties of waves, sound and acoustics, and the mathematical tools of Fourier analysis, together with an introduction to non-linear dynamics and chaos.
Oscillations
- Simple Harmonic Oscillator [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Damped Oscillations [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Forced Oscillations [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Resonance [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Coupled Oscillators [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Normal Modes [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
Waves
- Wave Equation [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Transverse Waves [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Longitudinal Waves [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Standing Waves [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Wave Superposition [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Wave Speed [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Group Velocity [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Phase Velocity [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Wave Packets [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
Sound & Acoustics
- Sound Waves [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Speed of Sound [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Sound Intensity [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Decibel Scale [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Doppler Effect [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Beats [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Acoustic Resonance [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
Mathematical Tools
- Fourier Analysis [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Fourier Series [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Fourier Transform [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Non-Linear Dynamics [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
- Chaos Theory [PENDING FULL ENTRY]
Already covered elsewhere in the Codex
No full entries in this domain are published yet. These live pages, in other domains, already cover closely related material:
- Simple Harmonic Oscillator Simulation — interactive simple harmonic motion
- Pendulum Simulation — oscillation with small and large amplitudes
- Quantum Harmonic Oscillator — oscillations in quantum mechanics
- Wave Function — waves as the language of quantum states
- Double-Slit Simulation — superposition and interference
- Gravitational Waves — waves in spacetime itself
- RC Circuit Simulation — exponential relaxation, the building block of damping
- Newton's Second Law — the equation of motion of every mechanical oscillator
Sources
- French, A.P. (1971). Vibrations and Waves. MIT Introductory Physics Series. Norton.
- Kinsler, L.E., Frey, A.R., Coppens, A.B., Sanders, J.V. (2000). Fundamentals of Acoustics (4th ed.). Wiley.