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Re: Waves



At 04:27 PM +0000 on 3/11/99, Barlow Newbolt wrote:
You are confusing me mightily about these waves and their
momentum. I will stipulate that phonons in solids and
photons in the electromagnetic field are concentrations of
energy, and that when a concentration of energy moves there
is a momentum associated with that motion.

That said, I must admit that the only way I see a momentum
flux to be associated with the traveling waves that may be
moving down a stretched string is relativistic and is again
associated with the motion of a bundle of energy down the
string. So far as I can see no rest mass is transported
and no momentum moves down the string.
WBN
Barlow Newbolt
Department of Physics and Engineering
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450

Young man if I could remember the names of all of
these particles I would have become a botanist
Enrico Fermi
Telephone and Phone Mail: 540-463-8881
Fax: 540-463-8884
e-mail: NewboltW@madison.acad.wlu.edu

Howdy,

Maybe in a sound wave thinking of the energy & momentum transport as
successive collisions it gets easier to picture. The original source
transfers energy and momentum to adjacent molecules which collide with the
next layer, etc.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs@interaccess.com)