Copyright © Michael Richmond.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
When ordinary objects meet, they usually smash into each other, deforming, breaking, and permanently modifying each other.
But when two waves meet, something very different happens: each wave continues moving at the same speed, in the same direction, with the same shape and size; wave can and do pass through each other completely unchanged. In any region where both waves are present at the same time, the result is simply the mathematical addition of the two wave functions: superposition.
In general, the addition of two arbitrary waves yields a result which is, well, not always easy to understand.
Today, we'll look at two special cases of superposition which produce relatively simple results. In each case, we'll first do the mathematics, and then consider some applications in the real world.
Copyright © Michael Richmond.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.