The Origin Of Waves

Austin Clarke’s luminous novel, written in vivid, hypnotic prose, reveals the dislocations of place and the nature of memory and the past. Two elderly Barbadian men, childhood friends who haven’t seen each other in fifty years, collide in a snowstorm on a Toronto street. In the warmth of a nearby bar, through the afternoon and into the night, they relate stories, exchange opinions, and share memories of a past in Barbados when, as children, neither could conceive any other place existed for them. As these two men confess to each other their innermost truths, their exploits and their love affairs, one tells the haunting story of a young Chinese woman, the other of the real reason for his visit to Toronto. Infused with pathos and humour, and with an affecting nostalgia for the idea of home, The Origin of Waves is a stunning and original novel by one of the country’s most gifted writers.

This title builds on introductory physics and emphasises understanding of vibratory motion and waves based on first principles. It is divided into three parts: Part I contains a preliminary chapter that reviews relevant ideas of mechanics and complex numbers; Part II discusses vibrations of mechanical systems, covering a simple harmonic oscillator, coupled oscillators, normal coordinates, beaded string, continuous string, standing waves, and Fourier series. Part II ends with a presentation of stationary solutions of driven finite systems. Part III is concerned with waves.

Schrödinger's Universe: Einstein, Waves and the Origin of the Natural Laws Erwin Schrodinger (1937) perceived that the whole Universe, what we observe as material bodies and forces, are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. When he and Einstein debated the particle theorists led by Neils Bohr, most scientists thought they had lost it. This book shows they were right; that all matter is one Wave Structure in the space of the Universe. If the stars did not exist, we could not exist.

This fourth volume of a four-volume textbook covers the oscillations of systems with one or more degrees of freedom; the concept of waves, focusing on light and sound; phase and group velocities, their physical meaning, and their measurement; diffraction and interference of light; polarization phenomena; and the formation of images in the eye and in optical instruments. The textbook as a whole covers electromagnetism, mechanics, fluids and thermodynamics, and waves and light, and is designed to reflect the typical syllabus during the first two years of a calculus-based university physics program. Throughout all four volumes, particular attention is paid to in-depth clarification of conceptual aspects, and to this end the historical roots of the principal concepts are traced. Emphasis is also consistently placed on the experimental basis of the concepts, highlighting the experimental nature of physics. Whenever feasible at the elementary level, concepts relevant to more advanced courses in quantum mechanics and atomic, solid state, nuclear, and particle physics are included. The textbook offers an ideal resource for physics students, lecturers and, last but not least, all those seeking a deeper understanding of the experimental basics of physics.

Ideal as a classroom text or for individual study, this unique one-volume overview of classical wave theory covers wave phenomena of acoustics, optics, electromagnetic radiations, and more.

Elastic waves possess some remarkable properties and have become ever more important to applications in fields such as telecommunications (signal processing), medicine (echography), and metallurgy (non-destructive testing). These volumes serve as a bridge between basic books on wave phenomena and more technically oriented books on specific applications of wave phenomena. The first volume studies the different mechanisms of propagation in isotropic and anisotropic media. The second volume describes the generation and applications of free and guided waves.

This book presents the fundamentals of the shock wave theory. The first part of the book, Chapters 1 through 5, covers the basic elements of the shock wave theory by analyzing the scalar conservation laws. The main focus of the analysis is on the explicit solution behavior. This first part of the book requires only a course in multi-variable calculus, and can be used as a text for an undergraduate topics course. In the second part of the book, Chapters 6 through 9, this general theory is used to study systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. This is a most significant well-posedness theory for weak solutions of quasilinear evolutionary partial differential equations. The final part of the book, Chapters 10 through 14, returns to the original subject of the shock wave theory by focusing on specific physical models. Potentially interesting questions and research directions are also raised in these chapters. The book can serve as an introductory text for advanced undergraduate students and for graduate students in mathematics, engineering, and physical sciences. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading and exercises for students.