Again, lasers make everything easier:
Apr. 4th, 2011 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shifty_gardenerI ate some of my roommate's months-old frosting from the freezer (vegan things can't go bad/don't need to be cooked in the first place, what are you talking about) and now everything in the Interference and Diffraction chapter of my physics textbook is reading like a bad Meg Ryan movie.
Exhibit A: Consider light waves that originate together at a single source, travel two different paths, and then rejoin. Suppose one wave's path is exactly half a wavelength longer than the other. Then, when the waves recombine, they'll be out of phase by half a wavelength and thus their superposition has smaller amplitude (zero, if the two interfering waves have exactly the same amplitude).
Exhibit B: Steady interference patterns occur only when waves are coherent, meaning they maintain a constant phase relation.
Coherence is not being drunk! Childhood friends only work as lovers (I hate that word) if they differ by a complete wavelength or not at all! I could handle seeing everything in chemistry as pictures of frogs and cows and faces but I really can't handle that happening in physics. Nothing will ever be taken in at the entendre it was intended to and I'll be laughing too hard to take my test and just bad news all around. :(
Exhibit A: Consider light waves that originate together at a single source, travel two different paths, and then rejoin. Suppose one wave's path is exactly half a wavelength longer than the other. Then, when the waves recombine, they'll be out of phase by half a wavelength and thus their superposition has smaller amplitude (zero, if the two interfering waves have exactly the same amplitude).
Exhibit B: Steady interference patterns occur only when waves are coherent, meaning they maintain a constant phase relation.
Coherence is not being drunk! Childhood friends only work as lovers (I hate that word) if they differ by a complete wavelength or not at all! I could handle seeing everything in chemistry as pictures of frogs and cows and faces but I really can't handle that happening in physics. Nothing will ever be taken in at the entendre it was intended to and I'll be laughing too hard to take my test and just bad news all around. :(
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Date: 2011-04-06 03:59 am (UTC)