Vibrations and waves

Chapter 17. Vibrations

Dandelion. Cello. Read those two words, and your brain instantly conjures a stream of associations, the most prominent of which have to do with vibrations. Our mental category of “dandelion-ness” is strongly linked to the color of light waves that vibrate about half a million billion times a second: yellow. The velvety throb of a cello has as its most obvious characteristic a relatively low musical pitch --- the note you are spontaneously imagining right now might be one whose sound vibrations repeat at a rate of a hundred times a second.

Evolution has designed our two most important senses around the assumption that not only will our environment be drenched with information-bearing vibrations, but in addition those vibrations will often be repetitive, so that we can judge colors and pitches by the rate of repetition. Granting that we do sometimes encounter non-repeating waves such as the consonant “sh,” which has no recognizable pitch, why was Nature's assumption of repetition nevertheless so right in general?

Repeating phenomena occur throughout nature, from the orbits of electrons in atoms to the reappearance of Halley's Comet every 75 years. Ancient cultures tended to attribute repetitious phenomena like the seasons to the cyclical nature of time itself, but we now have a less mystical explanation. Suppose that instead of Halley's Comet's true, repeating elliptical orbit that closes seamlessly upon itself with each revolution, we decide to take a pen and draw a whimsical alternative path that never repeats. We will not be able to draw for very long without having the path cross itself. But at such a crossing point, the comet has returned to a place it visited once before, and since its potential energy is the same as it was on the last visit, conservation of energy proves that it must again have the same kinetic energy and therefore the same speed. Not only that, but the comet's direction of motion cannot be randomly chosen, because angular momentum must be conserved as well. Although this falls short of being an ironclad proof that the comet's orbit must repeat, it no longer seems surprising that it does.

Conservation laws, then, provide us with a good reason why repetitive motion is so prevalent in the universe. But it goes deeper than that. Up to this point in your study of physics, I have been indoctrinating you with a mechanistic vision of the universe as a giant piece of clockwork. Breaking the clockwork down into smaller and smaller bits, we end up at the atomic level, where the electrons circling the nucleus resemble --- well, little clocks! From this point of view, particles of matter are the fundamental building blocks of everything, and vibrations and waves are just a couple of the tricks that groups of particles can do. But at the beginning of the 20th century, the tables were turned. A chain of discoveries initiated by Albert Einstein led to the realization that the so-called subatomic “particles” were in fact waves. In this new world-view, it is vibrations and waves that are fundamental, and the formation of matter is just one of the tricks that waves can do.

17.0 Vibrations by Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.