Thursday, December 27, 2012

Waves and wavelength


We just learned about the Light Year.

If you are standing in the water in the ocean or a big lake,
you can watch a wave going by you, something like this:
water wave
(from: wikipedia - wave)

If you stood in one place and watched a lot of waves going by, it might look something like this:
harmonic wave

And if you took a picture of a wave while it was standing still it might look like this:
sine wave
(from: wikipedia sine)

If you measured the distance from the start of the up wave, to the end of the down wave that is called the wavelength.