Category: Physics: Waves

Zoning Out over Jupiter

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Mathematics: Spherical Harmonics, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m nursing my usual mug of eye‑opener in Cal’s Coffee Shop when astronomer Cathleen and chemist Susan chatter in. “Morning, ladies. Cathleen, prepare to be even more smug.”

“Ooo, what should I be smug about?”

“Your Jupiter suggestion. Grab some coffee and a couple of chairs.” <screen‑tapping on Old Reliable> “Ready? First step — purple and violet. You’ll never see violet or purple light coming from a standard video screen.”

“He’s going spectrum‑y on us, right, Cathleen?”

“More like anti‑spectrum‑y, Susan. Purple light doesn’t exist in the spectrum. We only perceive that color when we see red mixed with blue like that second band on Sy’s display. Violet light is a thing in nature, we can see it in flowers and dyes and rainbows beyond blue. Standard screens can’t show violet because their LEDs just emit red, blue and green wavelengths. Old Reliable uses mixtures of those three to fake all its colors. Where are you going with this, Sy?””

“Deeper into Physics. Cast your eyes upon the squiggles to the right. The one in the middle represents the lightwave coming from purple‑in‑the‑middle. The waveform’s jaggedy, but if you compare peaks and troughs you can see its shape is the sum of the red and blue shapes. I scaled the graphs up from 700 nanometers for red and 450 for blue.”

“Straightforward spectroscopy, Sy, Fourier analysis of a complicated linear waveform. Some astronomers make their living using that principle. So do audio engineers and lots of other people.”

“Patience, Cathleen, I’m going beyond linear. Fourier’s work applies to variation along a line. Legendre and Poisson extended the analysis to—”

“Aah, spherical harmonics! I remember them from Physical Chemistry class. They’re what gives shapes to atoms. They’ve got electron shells arranged around the nucleus. Electron charge stays as close to the nucleus as quantum will let it. Atoms absorb light energy by moving charge away from there. If the atom’s in a magnetic field or near other atoms that gives it a z-axis direction then the shells split into wavey lumps going to the poles and different directions and that’s your p-, d– and f-orbitals. Bigger shells have more room and they make weird forms but only the transition metals care about that.”

The angular portion of the lowest-energy spherical harmonics
Credit: Inigo.quilez, under CCA SA 3.0 license
Adapted from Wieczorek and Meschede under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

“Considering you left out all the math, Susan, that’s a reasonable summary. I prefer to think of spherical harmonics as combinations of wave shapes at right angles. Imagine a spherical blob of water floating in space. If you tap it on top, waves ripple down to the bottom and back up again and maybe back down again. Those are zonal waves. A zonal harmonic averages over all E‑W longitudes at each N‑S latitude. Or you could stroke the blob on the side and set up a sectorial wave pattern that averages latitudes.”

“How about center‑out radial waves?”

“Susan’s shells do that job. My point was going to be that what sine waves do for characterizing linear things like sound and light, spherical harmonics do for central‑force systems. We describe charge in atoms, yes, but also sound coming from an explosion, heat circulating in a star, gravity shaping a planet. Specifically, Jupiter. Kaspi’s paper you gave me, Cathleen, I read it all the way to the Results table at the tail end. That was the rabbit‑hole.”

“Oh? What’s in the table?”

“Jupiter’s zonal harmonics — J‑names in the first column, J‑intensities in the second. Jn‘s shape resembles a sine wave and has n zeroes. Jupiter’s never‑zero central field is J0. Jn increases or decreases J0‘s strength wherever it’s non‑zero. For Jupiter that’s mostly by parts per million. What’s cool is the pattern you see when you total the dominating Jeven contributions.”

Data from Kaspi, et al.

Cathleen’s squinting in thought. “Hmm… green zone A would be excess gravity from Jupiter’s equatorial bulge. B‘s excess is right where Kaspi proposed the heavy downflow. Ah‑HAH! C‘s pink deficit zone’s right on top of the Great Red Spot’s buoyant updraft. Perfect! Okay, I’m smug.”

~ Rich Olcott

Little Strings And Big Ones

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

It’ll be another hot day so I’m walking the park early. No geese in the lake — they’ve either flown north or else they’re attacking a farmer’s alfalfa field. A familiar voice shatters the quiet. “Wait up, Moire, I got questions.”

“Good morning, Mr Feder. First question, but please pick up your pace, I want to get back to the air conditioning.”

“I thought string theory was about little teeny stuff but this guy said about cosmic strings. How can they be teeny and cosmic?”

“They can’t. Totally different things, probably. Next question.”

“C’mon, Moire, that wasn’t even an answer, just opened up a bunch more questions.”

“It’s a tangled path but the track mostly started in the late 18th Century. Joseph Fourier derived the equation for how heat progresses along a uniform metal bar. Turned out the equation’s general solution was the sum of an infinite series of sine waves.”

“Sign waves? Like a protest rally?”

“Haha. No, s‑i‑n‑e, a mathematical function where something regularly and smoothly deviates about some central value. Anyhow, mathematicians soon realized that Fourier’s cute trick for his heat equation could be applied to equations for everything from sound waves to signal processing to pretty much all of Physics. Economics, even. Any time you use the word ‘frequency‘ you owe something to Fourier.”

“If he ain’t got it in writing from the Patent Office, I ain’t paying nothing.”

“It’s not the kind of thing you can patent, and besides, he lived in France and died almost two centuries ago. Be generous with your gratitude, at least. Let’s move on. Fourier’s Big Idea was already <ahem> in the air early in the 20th Century when Bohr and the Physics gang were looking at atoms. No surprise, they extended the notion to describe how electronic charge worked in there.”

“I’m waiting for the strings.”

“The key is that an atom’s a confined system like a guitar string that only vibrates between the bridge and whatever fret you’re pressing on. Sound waves traveling in open space can have any wavelength, but if you pluck a confined guitar string the only wavelengths you can excite are whole number multiples of its active length. No funny fractions like π/73 of the length no matter how hard or soft you pluck the string. Atoms work the same way — charge is confined around the nucleus so only certain wave sizes and shapes are allowed.”

“You said ‘strings.’ We getting somewhere finally?”

“Closing in on it. String theory strings aren’t just teeny. If your body were suddenly made as large as the Observable Universe, string theory is about what might happen inside a box a billion times smaller than your size now.”

“Really tight quarters, got it, so only certain vibrations are allowed.”

“Mm-hm, except it’s not really vibration, it would be something that acts mathematically like vibration. Go back to your guitar string. Plucking gives it up‑down motion, strumming moves it side‑to‑side. Two degrees of freedom. The math says whatever’s going on in a string theory box needs 8 or 11 or maybe 25 degrees of freedom, depending on the theory. At the box‑size scale if there’s structure at all it looks nothing like a string.”

“Then how about the big cosmic strings? What’s confining them?”

“Nothing, and I mean that literally. If they exist they’re bounded by different flavors of empty space. It goes back to what we think happened right after the Big Bang during rapid space expansion. Whatever forces drove the process were probably limited by lightspeed. Local acceleration in one region wouldn’t immediately affect events in regions lightyears away. Nearly adjacent parts of the Universe could have been evolving at very different rates. Have you ever watched the whirlpools that form when a fast‑moving stream of water meets a slower‑moving one?”

“Fort Lee had a storm‑sewer pipe that let into the Hudson River. You got crazy whirlpools there after a hard rain.”

“Whirlpools are one kind of topological defect. They die away in water because friction dissipates the angular momentum. Hiding behind a whole stack of ifs and maybes, some theorists think collisions between differently‑evolving spacetime structures might generate long‑lived defects like cosmic strings or sheets.”

~~ Rich Olcott

LIGO And NANOGrav

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Afternoon coffee time, but Al’s place is a little noisier than usual. “Hey, Sy, come here and settle this.”

“Settle what, Al? Hi, Vinnie.”

<waves magazine> “This NANOGrav thing, they claim it’s a brand‑new kind of gravity wave. What’s that about?”

“Does it really say, ‘gravity wave‘? Let me see that. … <sigh> Press release journalism at its finest. ‘Gravity waves’ and ‘gravitational waves’ are two entirely different things.”

“I kinda remember you wrote about that, but it was so long ago I forget how they’re different.”

“Gravity waves happen in a fluid, like air or the ocean. Some disturbance, like a heat spike or an underwater landslide, pushes part of the fluid upward relative to a center of gravity. Gravity acts to pull that part down again but in the meantime the fluid’s own internal forces spread the initial up‑shift outwards. Adjacent fluid segments pull each other up and down and that’s a gravity wave. The whole process keeps going until friction dissipates the energy.”

“Gravitational waves don’t do that?”

“No, because gravitational waves temporarily modify the shape of space itself. The center doesn’t go up and down, it…” <showing a file on Old Reliable> “Here, see for yourself what happens. It’s called quadrupolar distortion. Mind you, the effects are tiny percentagewise which is why the LIGO apparatus had to be built kilometer‑scale in order to measure sub‑femtometer variations. The LIGO engineers took serious precautions to prevent gravity waves from masquerading as gravitational waves.”

“Alright, so now we’ve almost got used to LIGO machines catching these waves from colliding black holes and such. How are NANOGrav waves different?”

“Is infrared light different from visible light?”

“The Hubble sees visible but the Webb sees infrared.”

“Figures you’d have that cold, Al. What I think Sy’s getting at is they’re both electromagnetic even though we only see one of them. You’re gonna say the same for these new gravitational waves, right, Sy?”

“Got it in one, Vinnie. There’s only one electromagnetic field in the Universe but lots of waves running through it. Visible light is about moving charge between energy levels in atoms or molecules which is how the visual proteins in our eyes pick it up. Infrared can’t excite electrons. It can only waggle molecule parts which is why we feel it as heat. Same way, there’s only one gravitational field but lots of waves running through it. The LIGO devices are tuned to pick up drastic changes like the <ahem> massive energy release from a black hole collision.”

“You said ‘tuned‘. Gravitational waves got frequencies?”

“Sure. And just like light, high frequencies reflect high‑energy processes. LIGO detects waves in the kilohertz range, thousands of peaks per second. NANOGrav’s detection range is sub‑nanohertz, where one cycle can take years to complete. Amazingly low energy.”

“How can they detect anything that slow?”

“With really good clocks and a great deal of patience. The new reports are based on fifteen years of data, half a billion seconds counted out in nanoseconds.”

“Hey, wait a minute. LIGO’s only half‑a‑dozen years old. Where’d they get the extra data from, the future?”

“Of course not. Do you remember us working out how LIGO works? The center sends out a laser pulse along two perpendicular arms, then compares the two travel times when the pulse is reflected back. Light’s distance‑per‑time is constant, right? When a passing gravitational wave squeezes space along one arm, the pulse in that arm completes its round trip faster. The two times don’t match any more and everyone gets excited.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Good. NANOGrav also uses a timing‑based strategy, but it depends on pulsars instead of lasers. Before you ask, a pulsar is a rotating neutron star that blasts a beam of electromagnetic radiation. What makes it a pulsar is that the beam points away from the rotation axis. We only catch a pulse when the beam points straight at us like a lighthouse or airport beacon. Radio and X‑ray observatories have been watching these beasts for half a century but it’s only in the past 15 years that our clocks have gotten good enough to register timing hiccups when a gravitational wave passes between us and a pulsar.”

~ Rich Olcott

The Sound of Money

On By rolcottIn Physics: Money, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<chirp, chirp> “Moire, here, there’ll be a late-night surcharge for this call.”

“Hiya, Sy, it’s me, Vinnie. Got a minute? I wanna run something past you.”

“Sure, if it’s interesting enough to keep me awake.”

“It’s that Physics-money hobby horse you’ve been riding. I think I’ve got another angle on it for you.”

“Really? Shoot.”

“OK, a while ago you and me and Richard Feder talked about waves and how light waves and sound waves are different because light waves make things go up-and-down while the waves go forward but sound waves go back-and-forth.”

“Transverse waves versus compression waves, uh-huh.”

“Yeah and when you look close at a sound wave what you see is individual molecules don’t travel. What happens is like in a pool game where one ball bumps another ball and it stops but the bumped ball moves forward and the first ball maybe even moves back a little.”

“The compression momentum carries forward even though the particles don’t, right.”

“And that means that sound waves only travel as fast as the air molecules can move back and forth which is a lot slower than light waves which move by shaking the electric field. I got that, but why doesn’t sound move a lot faster in something like iron where the atoms don’t have to move?”

“Oh, it does, something like 200 times faster than in air. There’s a couple of factors in play. It all goes back to Newton —”

“Geez, he had a hand in everything Physics, didn’t he?”

“Except for electromagnetism and nuclear stuff. The available technology was just too primitive to let him experiment in those areas. Anyway, Newton discovered a formula connecting the speed of sound in a medium to its density. Like his Law of Gravity, it worked but he didn’t know why it worked. Also like gravity, we’ve got a better idea now.”

“What’s the better idea?”

“The key notions weren’t even invented until decades after Newton’s Principia was published. The magic words are the particulate nature of matter and intermolecular stiffness.”

“Hah?”

“One at a time. Newton was a particle guy to an extent. He believed that light is made of particles, but he didn’t take the next step to thinking of all matter as being made of particles. But it is, and the particles interact with each other. Think of it as stickiness. How effective the stickiness is depends on the temperature and which molecules you’re talking about. Gas molecules have so much kinetic energy relative to their sticky that they mostly just bounce off each other. In liquids and solids the molecules stay close enough together that the stickiness acts like springs. The springs may be more or less stiff depending on which molecules or ions or atoms are involved.”

“I see where you’re going. Stuff with stiffer springs doesn’t move as much as looser stuff at the same temperature; sound goes faster through a solid than through a liquid or gas. That’s what Newton figured out, huh?”

“No, he just measured and said, basically, ‘here’s the formula.‘ Just like with gravity, he didn’t suggest why the numbers were what they were. <yawn> So, you called with an idea about sound and money physics.”

“Right. Got off the track there, but this was helpful. What got me started was some newscaster saying how the Paycheck Protection Program is dumping money into the economy during the pandemic. My first thought was, ‘Haw, that’s gotta be a splash!‘ Then I imagined this pulse of money sloshing back and forth like a wave and that led me to sound waves and then I kept going. No dollar bill moves around that much, but when people spend them that’s like the compression wave moving out.”

“Interesting idea, Vinnie. From a Physics perspective, the question is, ‘How fast does the wave move?’ It’s another temperature‑versus‑stickiness thing.”

“Yeah, I figure money velocity measures the economy like temperature measures molecule motion. Money velocity goes up with inflation. If the velocity’s high people spend their money because why not.”

“Yup. From the government’s perspective the whole purpose of economic stimulation is getting the cash flowing again. Their problem is locating the money velocity kickover point.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Better A Saber Than A Club?

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a glass-handled paper-knife on my desk, a reminder of a physics experiment gone very bad back in the day. “Y’know, Vinnie, this knife gives me an idea for another Star Trek weapons technology.”

“What’s that, Sy?”

“Some kinds of wave have another property in addition to frequency, amplitude and phase. What do you know about seismology?”

“Not a whole lot. Uhh … earthquakes … Richter scale … oh, and the Insight lander on Mars has seen a couple dozen marsquakes in the first six months it was looking for them.”

“Cool. Well, where I was going is that earthquakes have three kinds of waves. One’s like a sound wave — it’s called a P‑wave or pressure wave and it’s a push-pull motion along the direction the wave is traveling. The second is called an S‑wave or shear wave. It generates motion in some direction perpendicular to the wave’s path.”

“Not only up-and-down?”

“No, could be any perpendicular direction. Deep in the Earth, rock can slide any which-way. One big difference between the two kinds is that a P‑wave travels through both solid and molten rock, but an S‑wave can’t. Try to apply shearing stress to a fluid and you just stir it around your paddle. The side-to-side shaking isn’t transmitted any further along the wave’s original path. The geophysicists use that difference among other things to map out what’s deep below ground.”

“Parallel and perpendicular should cover all the possibilities. What’s the third kind?”

“It’s about what happens when either kind of deep wave hits the surface. A P‑wave will use up most of its energy bouncing things up and down. So will an S‑wave that’s mostly oriented up-and-down. However, an S‑wave that’s oriented more-or-less parallel to the surface will shake things side-to-side. That kind’s called a surface wave. It does the most damage and also spreads out more broadly than a P- or S‑wave that meets the surface with the same energy.”

“This is all very interesting but what does it have to do with Starfleet’s weapons technology? You can’t tell a Romulan captain what direction to come at you from.”

“Of course not, but you can control the polarization angle in your weapon beams.”

“Polarization angle?”

Plane-polarized electromagnetic wave
Electric (E) field is red
Magnetic (B) field is blue
(Image by Loo Kang Wee and
Fu-Kwun Hwang from Wikimedia Commons)

“Yeah. I guess we sort of slid past that point. Any given S‑wave vibrates in only one direction, but always perpendicular to the wave path. Does that sound familiar?”

“Huh! Yeah, it sounds like polarized light. You still got that light wave movie on Old Reliable?”

“Sure, right here. The red arrow represents the electric part of a light wave. Seismic waves don’t have a magnetic component so the blue arrow’s not a thing for them. The beam is traveling along the y‑axis, and the electric field tries to move electrons up and down in the yz plane. A physicist would say the light beam is plane‑polarized. S‑waves are polarized the same way. See the Enterprise connection?”

“Not yet.”

“Think about the Star Trek force-projection weapons — regular torpedoes, photon torpedoes, ship-mounted phasers, tractor beams, Romulan pulse cannons and the like. They all act like a P‑wave, delivering push-pull force along the line of fire. Even if Starfleet’s people develop a shield-shaker that varies a tractor beam’s phase, that’s still just a high-tech version of a club or cannon ball. Beamed S‑waves with polarization should be interesting to a Starfleet weapons designer.”

“You may have something. The Bridge crew talks about breaking through someone’s shield. Like you’re using a mace or bludgeon. A polarized wave would be more like an edged knife or saber. Why not rip the shield instead? Those shields are never perfect spheres around a ship. If your beam’s polarization angle happens to match a seam where two shield segments come together — BLOOEY!”

“That’s the idea. And you could jiggle that polarization angle like a jimmy — another way to confuse the opposition’s defense system.”

“I’m picturing a Klingon ship’s butt showing through a rip in its invisibility cloak. Haw!”

~~ Rich Olcott

How To Wave A Camel

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“You’re sayin’, Sy, no matter what kind of wave we got, we can break it down by amplitude, frequency and phase?”

“Right, Vinnie. Your ears do that automatically. They grab your attention for the high-amplitude loud sounds and the high-frequency screechy ones. Goes back to when we had to worry about predators, I suppose.”

“I know about music instruments and that, but does it work for other kinds of waves?”

“It works for waves in general. You can match nearly any shape with the right combination of sine waves. There’s a few limitations. The shape has to be single-valued — no zig-zags — and it has to be continuous — no stopping over here and starting over there..”

“Ha! Challenge for you then. Use waves to draw a camel. Better yet– make it a two-humped camel.”

“A Bactrian camel, eh? OK, there’s pizza riding on this, you understand. <keys clicking> All right, image search for Bactrian camel … there’s a good one … scan for its upper profile … got that … tack on some zeroes fore and aft … dump that into my Fourier analysis engine … pull the coefficients … plot out the transform — wait, just for grins, plot it out in stages on top of the original … here you are, Vinnie, you owe me pizza.”

“OK, what is it?”

“Your Bactrian camel.”

“Yeah, I can see that, but what’s with the red line and the numbers?”

“OK, the red line is the sum of a certain number of sine waves with different frequencies but they all start and end at the same places. The number says how many waves were used in the sum. See how the ‘1‘ line is just a single peak, ‘3‘ is more complicated and so on? But I can’t just add sine waves together — that’d give the same curve no matter what data I use. Like in a church choir. The director doesn’t want everyone to sing at top volume all the time. Some passages he wants to bring out the alto voices so he hushes the men and sopranos, darker passages he may want the bases and baritones to dominate. Each section has to come in with its own amplitude.”

“So you give each sine wave an amplitude before you add ’em together. Makes sense, but how do you know what amplitudes to give out?”

“That gets into equations, which I know you don’t like. In practice these days you get all the amplitudes in one run of the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm, but it’s easier to think of it as the stepwise process that they used before the late 1960s. You start with the lowest-frequency sine wave that fits between the start- and end-points of your data.”

“Longest wavelength to match the data length, gotcha.”

“Mm-hm. So you put in that wave with an amplitude near the average value of your data in the middle art of the range. That’s picture number 1.”

“Step 2 is to throw in the next shorter wavelength that fits, right? Half the wavelength, with an amplitude to match the differences between your data and wave 1. And then you keep going.”

“You got the idea. Early physicists and their grad students used up an awful lot of pencils, paper and calculator time following exactly that strategy. Painful. The FFT programs freed them up to do real thinking.”

“So you get a better and better approximation from adding more and more waves. What stopped you from getting it perfect?”

“Two things — first, you can’t use more waves than about half the number of data points. Second, you see the funny business at his nose? Those come from edges and sudden sharp changes, which Fourier doesn’t handle well. That’s why edges look flakey in JPEG images that were saved in high-compression mode.”

“Wait, what does JPEG have to do with this?”

“JPEG and most other kinds of compressed digital image, you can bet that Fourier-type transforms were in play. Transforms are crucial in spectroscopy, astronomy, weather prediction, MP3 music recordings –“

Suddenly Vinnie’s wearing a big grin. “I got a great idea! While that Klingon ship’s clamped in our tractor beam, we can add frequencies that’d make them vibrate to Brahms’ Lullaby.”

“Bad idea. They’d send back Klingon Opera.”

~~ Rich Olcott

How To Phase A Foe

On By rolcottIn Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“It’s Starfleet’s beams against Klingon shields, Vinnie. I’m saying both are based on wave phenomena.”

“What kind of wave, Sy?”

“Who knows? They’re in the 24th Century, remember. Probably not waves in the weak or strong nuclear force fields — those’d generate nuclear explosions. Could be electromagnetic waves or gravitational waves, could be some fifth or sixth force we haven’t even discovered yet. Whatever, the Enterprise‘s Bridge crew keeps saying ‘frequency’ so it’s got to have some sort of wave‑ishness.”

“OK, you’re sayin’ whatever’s waving, if it’s got frequency, amplitude and phase then we can talk principles for building a weapon system around it. I can see how Geordi’s upping the amplitude of the Enterprise‘s beam weapons would help Worf’s battle job — hit ’em harder, no problem. Jiggling the frequencies … I sort of see that, it’s what they always talk about doing anyway. But you say messing with beam phase can be the kicker. What difference would it make if a peak hits a few milliseconds earlier or later?”

“There’s more than one wave in play. <keys clicking> Here’s a display of the simplest two-beam interaction.”

“I like pictures, but this one’s complicated. Read it out to me.”

“Sure. The bottom line is our base case, a pure sine wave of some sort. We’re looking at how it’s spread out in space. The middle line is the second wave, traveling parallel to the first one. The top line shows the sum of the bottom two at each point in space. That nets out what something at that point would feel from the combined influence of the two waves. See how the bottom two have the same frequency and amplitude?”

“Sure. They’re going in the same direction, right?”

“Either that or exactly the opposite direction, but it doesn’t matter. Time and velocity aren’t in play here, this is just a series of snapshots. When I built this video I said, ‘What will things look like if the second beam is 30° out of phase with the first one? How about 60°?‘ and so on. The wheel shape just labels how out-of-phase they are, OK?”

“Give me a sec. … OK, so when they’re exactly in sync the angle’s zero and … yup, the top line has twice the amplitude of the bottom one. But what happened to the top wave at 180°? Like it’s not there?”

“It’s there, it’s just zero in the region we’re looking at. The two out-of-phase waves cancel each other in that interval. That’s how your noise-cancelling earphones work — an incoming sound wave hits the earphone’s mic and the electronics generate a new sound wave that’s exactly out-of-phase at your ear and all you hear is quiet.”

“I’ve wondered about that. The incoming sound has energy, right, and my phones are using up energy. I know that because my battery runs down. So how come my head doesn’t fry with all that? Where does the energy go?”

“A common question, but it confuses cause and effect. Yes, it looks like the flatline somehow swallows the energy coming from both sides but that’s not what happens. Instead, one side expends energy to counter the other side’s effect. Flatlines signal success, but you generally get it only in a limited region. Suppose these are sound waves, for example, and think about the molecules. When an outside sound source pushes distant molecules toward your ear, that produces a pressure peak coming at you at the speed of sound, right?”

“Yeah, then…”

“Then just as the pressure peak arrives to push local molecules into your ear, your earphone’s speaker acts to pull those same molecules away from it. No net motion at your ear, so no energy expenditure there. The energy’s burned at either end of the transmission path, not at the middle. Don’t worry about your head being fried.”

“Well that’s a relief, but what does this have to do with the Enterprise?”

“Here’s a sketch where I imagined an unfriendly encounter between a Klingon cruiser and the Enterprise after Geordi upgraded it with some phase-sensitive stuff. Two perpendicular force disks peaked right where the Klingon shield troughed. The Klingon’s starboard shield generator just overloaded.”

“That’ll teach ’em.”

“Probably not.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Three Ploys to Face A Foe

On By rolcottIn Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Run done, Vinnie and I head upstairs to my office to get out of the windchill. My Starship Enterprise poster reminds me. “Geez, it’s annoying.”

“Now what, Sy?”

“I’ve been binge-watching old Star Trek:Next Generation TV programs and the technobabble’s gotten annoying.”

“What’s the problem this time?”

“Well, whenever the Enterprise gets into a fix where it’s their phaser beam or tractor beam or shields against some new Borg technology or something, Geordi or Worf get busy making adjustments and it’s always the frequency. ‘Modulate to a lower frequency!‘ or ‘Raise the frequency!‘ or even ‘Randomize the frequency!‘ At one point Dr Crusher was fiddling with someone’s ‘biophysical frequency.’ They miss two-thirds of the options, and especially they miss the best one when you’re trying to mess up your opponent’s stuff.”

“Wait, I thought we said frequency’s what waves are all about. There’s more?”

“Oh, yeah. The fact that they’re saying ‘frequency’ says their beams and shields and such are probably based on some kind of wave phenomenon. The good guys should be fiddling with amplitude and phase, too. Especially phase.”

“OK, I’ll bite. What’re those about?”

I poke a few keys on my computer and bring this up on the wall screen.

“OK, we’ve talked about frequency, the distance or time between peaks. Frequency’s the difference between a tuba and a piccolo, between infra-red and X-rays. That top trace is an example of modulating the frequency, somehow varying the carrier wave’s peak-to-peak interval. See the difference between the modulated wave and the dotted lines where it would be if the modulation were turned off?”

“Modulation means changing?”

“Mm-hm. The important thing is that only the piece within the box gets altered.”

“Got it. OK, you’ve labelled the middle line ‘Amplitude‘ and that’s gotta be about peak height because they’re taller inside the modulation box than the dotted line. I’m guessing here, but does the bigger peak mean more energy?”

“Good guess, but it depends on the kind of wave. Sound waves, yup, that’s exactly what’s going on. Light waves are different, because a photon’s energy is is determined by its frequency. You can’t pump up a photon’s amplitude, but you can pump up the number of photons in the beam.”

“Hey, Sy, I just realized. Your amplitude modulation and frequency modulation must be the AM and FM on my car radio. So in AM radio they sit on the station’s frequency, right, and make a signal by tweaking the amount of power going to the antenna?”

“That’s the basic idea, though engineers chasing efficiency have improved things a lot in the century since they started experimenting with radio. Implementing FM is more complicated so took a few more decades to make that competitive with AM.”

“So what’s the story with, um, ‘phase modulation‘? My radio’s got no PM dial.”

<poking more keys> “Here’s the way I think of a sine wave — it’s what you’d see looking at a mark on the edge of a rolling wheel. The size of the wheel sets the wave’s amplitude, the wheel’s rotation speed sets the wave’s frequency, and the phase is where it is in the rotation cycle. Modulating the phase would be like jerking the wheel back and forth while it’s rotating.”

“So that’s why there’s hiccups in your bottom red Phase line — things don’t match up across a phase shift.. Hmm… I’m still thinking about my radio. AM sound tends to have more static, especially during thunderstorms. That’d be because my radio amplifies any electromagnetic wave amplitudes at the frequency I’d set it for and that includes waves from the lightning. FM sound’s a lot clearer. Is that because frequency shifts don’t happen much?”

“Exactly.”

“PM broadcasts ought to be even safer against noise. How come I never see them?”

“You do. WiFi uses it, precisely because it works well even at extremely low power levels. OK, challenge question — why do you think I think PM would be better than FM against Borg tech?”

“It’d be like in fencing or martial arts. Frequency’s jab, jab, jab, regular-like. Shifting your wave phase would be mixing it up, they wouldn’t know when the next peak’s coming.”

“Yup. Now tell Geordi.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Disentangling 3-D Plaid

On By rolcottIn Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Our lake-side jog has slowed to a walk and suddenly Mr Feder swerves off the path to thud onto a park bench. “I’m beat.”

Meanwhile, heavy footsteps from behind on the gravel path and a familiar voice. “Hey, Sy, you guys talking physics?”

“Well, we were, Vinnie. Waves, to be exact, but Feder’s faded and anyway his walk wasn’t fast enough to warm me up.”

“I’ll pace you. What’d I miss?”

“Not a whole lot. So many different kinds of waves but physicists have abstracted them down to a common theme — a pattern that moves through space.”

“Haw — flying plaid.”

“That image would work if each fiber color carried specific values of energy and momentum and the cross-fibers somehow add together and there’s lots of waves coming from all different directions so it’s 3-D.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“As complicated as the sound from a symphony.”

“I prefer dixieland.”

“Same principle. Trumpet, trombone, clarinet, banjo — many layers of harmony but you can choose to tune in on just one line. That’s a clue to how physicists un-complicate waves.”

“How so?”

“Back in the early 19th century, Fourier showed that you can think about any continuous variation stream, no matter how complicated, in terms of a sum of very simple variations called sine waves. You’ve seen pictures of a sine wave — just a series of Ss laid on their sides and linked together head-to-tail.”

“Your basic wiggly line.”

“Mm-hm, except these wiggles are perfectly regular — evenly spaced peaks, all with the same height. The regularity is why sine waves are so popular. Show a physicist something that looks even vaguely periodic and they’ll immediately start thinking sine wave frequencies. Pythagoras did that for sound waves 2500 years ago.”

“Nah, he couldn’t have — he died long before Fourier.”

“Good point. Pythagoras didn’t know about sine waves, but he did figure out how sounds relate to spatial frequencies. Pluck a longer bowstring, get a lower note. Pinch the middle of a vibrating string. The strongest remaining vibration in the string sounds like the note from a string that’s half as long. Pythagoras worked out length relationships for the whole musical scale.”

“You said ‘spacial frequency’ like there’s some other kind.”

“There is, though they’re closely related. Your ear doesn’t sense the space frequency, the distance between peaks. You sense the time between peaks, the time frequency, which is the space frequency, peaks per meter, times how fast the wave travels, meters per second. See how the units work out?”

“Cute. Does that space frequency/time frequency pair-up work for all kinds of waves?”

“Mostly. It doesn’t work for standing waves. Their energy’s trapped between reflectors or some other way and they just march in place. Their time frequency is zero peaks per second whatever their peaks per meter space frequency may be. Interesting effects can happen if the wave velocity changes, say if the wave path crosses from air to water or if there’s drastic temperature changes along the path.”

“Hah! Mirages! Wait, that’s light getting deflected after bouncing off a hot surface into cool air. Does sound do mirages, too?”

“Sure. Our hearing’s not sharp enough to notice sonic deflection by thermal layering in air, but it’s a well-known issue for sonar specialists. Echoes from oceanic cold/warm interfaces play hob with sonar echolocation. I’ll bet dolphins play games with it when the cold layer’s close enough to the surface.”

“Those guys will find fun in anything. <pause> So Pythagoras figured sound frequencies playing with a bow. Who did it for light?”

“Who else? Newton, though he didn’t realize it. In his day people thought that light was colorless, that color was a property of objects. Newton used the rainbow images from prisms to show that color belonged to light. But he was a particle guy. He maintained that every color was a different kind of particle. His ideas held sway for over 150 years until Fresnel convinced the science community that lightwaves are a thing and their frequencies determine their color. Among other things Fresnel came up with the math that explained some phenomena that Newton had just handwaved past.”

“Fresnel was more colorful than Newton?”

“Uh-uh. Compared to Newton, Fresnel was pastel.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Wave As You Go By

On By rolcottIn Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A winter day, a bit nippy and windy enough to raise scattered whitecaps on the park lake. Apparently neither the geese nor Mr Richard Feder (of Fort Lee, NJ) enjoy that — the geese are standing on the shore and he’s huddled down on a bench as I pass. “Hey Moire, I gotta question.”

“Mr Feder. I’m trying to keep warm. If you want answers you’ll have to jog along.”

“Oh, alright <oof>. OK, watching those waves got me thinking. They keep going because the wind pushes on ’em, right? So what pushes on sound waves and light waves? If something pushes hard enough on a sound wave does it speed up enough to be a light wave?”

“So many questions. Are you sure you’ve got enough wind?”

“Ha, ha. I’ve been working out a little.”

“We’ll see. Well, first, nothing needs to push on a wave once it’s started. They travel on their own momentum.”

“Then why do these waves die away when the wind stops?”

“You’ve got two things going on there, on different time scales. When the wind stops blowing it stops making new waves. Actually, winds rarely stop all at once, they taper off. It looks like waves are dying away but really you just see smaller and smaller waves. Inside a single wave, though, friction takes its toll.”

“Friction? Waves rub against each other? That’s not what’s going on here — they keep their distance unless different groups run crosswise and then they all just keep going.”

Turbulence in a water wave

“Not friction between waves, friction within a wave. There’s a lot of turbulence inside a water wave — the wind piles up surface molecules on one side, gravity and surface tension move the other side’s molecules downward, and the ones inside are pulled in every direction. All that helter-skelter motion randomizes the wave’s momentum and converts the wave’s energy to heat. When that’s gone, the wave’s gone.”

“So how’s sound different from that?”

“Lots of ways. To begin with, wind and gravity move molecules up and down perpendicular to the wave’s direction of travel. Sound waves aren’t affected by gravity. They move molecules back and forth parallel to the wave’s direction.”

“But they still die out, right? Turn to heat and all that?”

“Absolutely, Mr Feder. How fast a wave dies out depends on what heat-conversion processes are in play. In a water wave gravity and surface tension work together to smooth things out. Neither’s active in sound waves. The only way a sound wave can lose energy is through random collisions between molecules that aren’t in sync with the wave. Could be the wave hits a mushy object or maybe it just gets buried in other waves.”

“Like at a football game, when everyone’s shouting but all you hear is the roar.”

“Pretty good example, Mr Feder.”

“So how’s a light wave different?”

“Light waves don’t even need molecules. The electromagnetic field near a particle is the net effect of all the attractions and repulsions it feels from all other charged particles everywhere in the Universe. When some charged particle somewhere moves, that changes the field. The change is transmitted throughout the field as a wave traveling at the speed of light.”

“What makes it die away?”

“It doesn’t. On a dark, clear night your eyes can see stars a quintillion miles away. Astronomers with their instruments can detect objects millions of times further away.”

“No smoothing out? How come?”

“That’s a very deep question, Mr Feder, one that really bothered Einstein. You’d think a photon’s wave would get fainter the further it spreads. In fact, it delivers all its energy to the first charged particle it can interact with, no matter how far it had traveled. Weird, huh?”

“Weird, all right. So we got these three very different things — they start different, they push different, they got different speeds, they die different, but we call them all waves. Why’s that?”

“They’re all waves because they’re all patterns that transmit energy and momentum across space. Physicists have found general rules that apply to the patterns, whatever the wave type. Equations that work for one kind work for many others, too.”

“Gravity waves?”

“And gravitational waves.”

~~ Rich Olcott