Physics Commons^™

01 Harmonic Oscillations, Charles G. Torre

Foundations of Wave Phenomena

Everyone has seen waves on water, heard sound waves and seen light waves. But, what exactly is a wave? Of course, the goal of this course is to answer this question for you. But for now you can think of a wave as a traveling or oscillatory disturbance in some continuous medium (air, water, the electromagnetic field, etc.). As we shall see, waves can be viewed as a collective e↵ect resulting from a combination of many harmonic oscillations. So, to begin, we review the basics of harmonic motion.