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Clickersnota bene: PHYS103 MUST be taken in the same semester as PHYS102 if you're trying to fulfill a science lab course general education requirement (DSNL). Do Participation #1 and Homework #1 on ELMS! Buy your clicker at the bookstore. Make sure it's one of the right ones: if you're not buying an app for your mobile device, the RF-LCD is the recommended choice (click on the pictures at right to see up close). And register your clicker here |
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Some BasicsFun with powers of 10 in physical scale Here's a website for playing with wavelength and frequency to get a sense of scale. It's somewhat abstract. Learn your prefixes. It's not as unfamiliar as you might think (okay, except for pico and tera; and the funny "mu" for micro).
The website on Scientific Notation should help those who need a refresher, or those who didn't understand the first time they saw it. By the way, try timing the wave in the box to the right. The scale on the horizontal axis goes from 0 to 12 m. For more fun with waves (i.e., to see the difference between transverse waves like light and longitudinal waves like sound), you can try these applets. Scroll down to the section on waves, and check out transverse and longitudinal. One important thing is that you can change the frequency, but the velocity of the wave is constant so what happens to the wavelength? Experiment! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
But Does It Have a Good Beat? |
Beats applet
Here's a great beats applet to play with so you can see what happens when you add two waves together, i.e., superposition. The graph you see is two waves "travelling" in space to the right. What do you notice about the wavespeed as you change frequency? (It's constant!) Try these various settings for the two frequencies:
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