Wavefronts
What are the lines around a wave, also what is a wavefront?
(edited 8 years ago)
Original post by Jennifer50
What are the lines around a wave, also what is a wavefront?
What lines? What wave?
I think its the highest points of a wave so the maximum amplitude
my teacher described it as the reflective top parts you see at the beach of water waves
my teacher described it as the reflective top parts you see at the beach of water waves
Original post by Jennifer50
the lines around the arrow:
The diagram is showing refraction, how waves change direction when they cross a boundary between materials that transmit waves at different speeds.
Those lines represent the peaks of the waves at an instant in time - like a snapshot, the arrows represent the direction the wave is traveling in.
the wavelength is the distance between one peak and it's nearest neighboring peak measured in the direction of the arrow.
the *wavefront* is the line connecting points that are distrurbed by the same amount at the same time, if you threw a stone into the middle of a deep pond with a smooth water surface, the wavefront would be the line separating smooth water from the wavy water... it'd be a circle that expanded as time passed - if the frequency of the wave in that diagram was 10 Hz the wavefront would be moving left to right taking 1/10 th of a second to move from the position of one of the lines to the next.
So essentially are there millions of waves being refracted but this diagram just shows one?
Original post by Jennifer50
So essentially are there millions of waves being refracted but this diagram just shows one?
might be millions I suppose, if the diagram relates to an experiment the experimenter will have tried to keep it as simple as possible by investigating one wave at a time.
Original post by Jennifer50
So essentially are there millions of waves being refracted but this diagram just shows one?
You should look up Huygens Principle
