Why is it that most forms of Energy are transfered in waves? e.g. light, sound, and the ocean. I feel like it would make more sense for energy to travel in just one big wave.
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In general, ignoring lots of subtleties, single instantaneous events *do* transfer energy as a single wave. A sharp sound, for instance, or the pressure wave of an explosive. What creates multiple waves is *vibration*, but all a vibration is is a bunch of instantaneous events occuring periodically. Some subtleties:
– Subtlety 1: Light shouldn’t be thought of as a wave in the classical sense. Sure, mathematically some it’s properties suggests wave-like behavior, but that mathematical relation between light and waves doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a useful intuitive relation, especially for a layman. For one think, thinking that way prompts the question of “what medium is the wave traveling through?” for which there’s no good answer.
– Subtlety 2: Sound and water waves actually behave quite differently, as a result of something called Hyugen’s principle. If you drop a rock in a lake, you get a big wave traveling out in a circle from where the rock lands, and then you get all these smaller “residual” waves that follow it. If you clap your hands, you get a single sharp wave, traveling out from the source, and no residual waves. This difference is actually true of waves in any two dimensional vs three dimensional medium.
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