Before I get a bunch of answers talking about the speed of light varying when traveling through different mediums and capacitors and resistors being used to filter EM waves on a radio, I understand all of that. What I don’t understand is how one wave can be easily separated from another wave. For example, let’s say I have a 5Hz and 10Hz wave generator in water. I’m watching the waves propagate from the generator. As an observer of this, how can I know what signal is coming from the 5Hz generator and what signal is coming from the 10Hz generator? To me, it looks like the amplitude of a 10Hz wave is just doubling every other time.
In: Physics
I can also take a crack at answering this myself. My thoughts are that the wave constructed on water is not comparable to EM waves in this respect. When we are looking at EM waves, there are different photons, each oscillating at a different rate. So it’s easy to me to imagine a filter that looks at the photons on a “case by case” basis and filters them based on their individual oscillation frequency. This is not possible with the water because it is not propagated by photons and thus I believe that the water wave cannot be deconstructed into it’s constituent waves. I just don’t know if this explanation is correct, or just some mumbo jumbo that I came up with to understand this in my brain.
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