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Or a canoe. Another misconception which is rampant in the physics teaching
community is the idea that the Kelvin wake left by a ferry (or a canoe or
a duck!) has an opening angle that is somehow related to its speed and the
"speed of waves on the surface of water" in the same way that the opening
angle of the shock wave due to a supersonic object (a bullet or an airplane
or a car!) is. The phenomena are utterly unrelated, but still problems in
physics books are based upon this erroneous idea. It is easily demonstrated
that the Kelvin wake angle is independent of the speed of a canoe.