Why did they choose to make AC change in time based on a sin wave and not any other math function like quadratic or logarithmic
In: Physics
When you look at how quickly the value of a sine wave changes, you’ll notice that this is also a sine wave. This simple fact makes sine waves natural for electricity in a ton of ways.
The first thing we noticed about it was that, since the change is also a sine wave, passing a sine wave through a transformer produced another sine wave. There are a lot of transformers between your power company and your home, so this alone is a big deal.
More broadly, in differential equations (big hard math problems that involve change over time) a single sine wave behaves very nicely. Stacking multiple sine waves on top of eachother also behaves very nicely. If we analyze *any*thing as a stack of sine waves, we can look at each sine wave separately, and this property makes sine waves the “just one single piece” of signal processing.
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