Speaking of wave function. When I was little, my blue-sky question was always, why do waves go up and down? Later I wondered the same thing about more subtle kinds of waves.
I’m still wondering. Light can travel in waves. Energy too. Why? Why up and down? This way and that way. Whatever makes it go either way, why does it let it go instead of just pulling it one way?
What’s with the tennis match?
I clearly do not know why, but your question is very intriguing...
Waves on an oscilloscope go from side-to-side when the display is rotated 90 degrees. It’s a matter of display and perspective. Turn your head sideways and view the same wave.
Two waves of the same frequency superimposed, one rotated 90 degrees to the other, form a circle.
I always wondered this about waves-
If two waves are traveling in such a way that they cancel each other out, then how is energy still transferred past the point where they cancel?
Would you have a perfectly flat spot in the ocean -where all waves cancel each other- suddenly a wave appears on the opposit end?
My wife’s a high school Calculus teacher. When we had no kids I got to attend the various state and local math teacher association dinners and luncheons.
The lectures were all top notch.
One discovery made by one of the teachers in the group, which she subsequently wrote up in a paper that is STILL waiting for peer review is the observation that water flows in nature according to a sinusoidal function. In fact, along with water, many other substances and objects in nature tend to want to flow across or through a medium in a sinusoidal function. It’s different from a sinusoid, this sinusoidal function but the idea is this:
Take a sheet of glass and an eyedropper full of water. Hold the glass at a 45 degree angle and then slowly discharge the eyedropper. You can also see some of this on a clean glass surface in the shower. Little rivulets of water snaking down the glass.
Does it flow straight down the glass? Nope. Sinusoidal function.
You know the breakaway chains you put dog tags on? Take a stereo speaker and drape the chain across the speaker from top of speaker to bottom. Put in a white or pink noise CD and turn it on - sinusoidal function.
Pictures of rivers that have not been subject to damming or straightening taken from space? Sinusoidal functions.
She can’t describe why, but the evidence is striking.
Watch a skier coming down a slope. Do they come straight down? Their track forms a sinusoidal function.
One possible explanation of all this is that while gravity exerts a force on an object, particles flows in nature may tend to seek a state of constant velocity. acceleration causes a linear increase in velocity. Nature wants constant velocity.
Studies of outfielders fielding fly balls shows that the brain is quick enough to calculate the trajectory of a fly ball, account for wind, and then tell the outfielder WHAT SPEED he has to run in order for him/her to catch the ball.
The fielder NEVER accelerates to the place the ball will fall in the outfield. He or she always travels at a constant rate of speed, unless a gust causes the player to dive at the ball, or fair the ball back toward the athlete so that he has to slow down to keep from over running the ball.
How do you bleed off the velocity? - form a wave function.
Every oscillation attenuates the increase in velocity so that, for example, a skier’s descent down a hill occurs more or less at a constant speed, even though gravity is forever trying to increase the speed.
According to the OLD quantum theory, light travels at a constant speed of 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. It oscillates too, so maybe photons are under constant acceleration too, which makes them oscillate in order to bleed the speed off such that the rate of speed is constant. That doesn’t make any sense, of course, because these photons would essentially have to be moving through a media which would allow this bleeding off of speed, like a skier traveling through snow, accelerated by gravity.
Fact is, light keeps going without stopping. How does that work? You fire a bullet from a gun and when it encounters another force it eventually stops. Light SORT of does that, accept now they have evidence that light speeds up and slows down. Huh?
As I’m thinking about it, it may be that there is no such thing as ‘linear’ acceleration. All acceleration in nature may be angular, and when the distances are short, the acceleration appears linear, but really isn’t.
The Universe is right handed.