Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Waves...

This post aint nothing but a rambling, a totally unscientific one at tht...so be-Ware ... :)

This trail began when a bat whizzed past me yest eve, when i was walking home... My mind decided to load into memory the fact - tht bats use 'ultra-sonic' frequencies to avoid hitting ne obstacles, which they need to coz they are blind. howzzat for my mem? :D

neways frm thr, i started thinking wht if, we could actually hear such high frequency sound waves, how will they actually sound?! Thn not being able to go much further on tht road, i started off on the frequencies path, got this notion tht - the only difference between ne kind of wave must be da frequency, so tht means light 'n sound aint completely diff except for their frequencies...thnx to Batt for clearing this mis-conception...neways tht comes later....so...hmm....yep da frequencies of sound 'n light...thn started coming up with other differences...'n the word 'photon' suddenly made its appearance in my mind....so is tht da only other differentiating character is tht light is made of photons unlike sound? thn remembered tht light has dual nature....frm long lost physics lessons... :) some experiment to prove particle nature....still 'm not able to recollect da name of it but... :( oh wait...is it 'diffraction'? hmm...again not sure...neways ditching tht...whr was i...yep da dual nature....neways was no closer to ans...'n by thn i reached home.... :)

if you think this post ends here...sorry....u may have to suffer some more of this crap.... :D
well after reaching home...logged in 'n manage to catch a physicist friend of mine...'n who was kind enuf to tolerate 'n ans my stupid questions...neways here's some gyaan i got frm him for benefit of other totally ignorant guys like me.... :)

'Sound waves are mechanical waves, they need a physical medium to propogate' so that means you cant have sound in space/vaccum....so if you thought...tht means you cant have inter-planetary cell phone services the way i thought... :( think again...apparently all da cell phone services use radio waves....
so my next question was whts da diff b/n radio wave 'n a light wave...only da frequencies...? 'n apparently it is tht way...they are all electro-magnetic waves.....so me was right abt something after a long time... :)
so my next thought was something like this - 'now that you convert sound waves to radio waves...'n radio waves to light...so does tht mean you convert sound to light?' :D
Apparently theoretically you can convert energy frm one form to ne other....

'n i came back to my 1st thought...wht if u cud hear ultra-sonic sound waves....wht if you devleop some different functionality...which say processes radio-waves directly?! As in now ur senses - 'Seeing' 'n 'Hearing' plays with light 'n sound waves....on da same lines...y not some other sense which uses other waves? :D

well now reflecting back on this....its funny how i never thought on such lines before when i was @ school 'n supposedly studying all such stuff... :) Wonder why we study all these, when we (most of us) nvr think/use...make it hardly rem...all of this? but guess its gud to have such knowledge...actually ne knowledge... :)

5comentarios:

Blogger Chax said...

honey,
sound waves are not "transformed" into radio waves. Radio waves rather act as a carrier for the information that is present in the sound wave.
I'm sure your physicist friend will tell you the same if you gave him enough time ;) ...
anyways . i too am interested in these topics.
Btw, Interference patterns (age old Thomas Young) showed that light is a wave. Photoelectric effect showed light has particles (Einstien). A double slit experiment in which a single photon is shot at the 2 slits - yet producing an interference pattern confirmed its dual nature.
nice thoughts ... audible range of dog / some other animal .. is more ... not sure if it includes ultrasonic.

Thursday, 07 December, 2006  
Blogger Puthali said...

hmm...yea thts wht i thought later on...its more of a representation thn transformation.... :) so its like you are producing radio waves...using sound as one of the input funcions in da wave?...converting one form of energy to another...? btw wht xactly produces sound? whts da range of sound waves...? i.e not specific to one animal...
Neways think, shd ferret out my +2 physics text-book before i start making a fool of myself, asking totally stupid questions... :D

Thursday, 07 December, 2006  
Blogger Chax said...

[cliche]
there are no stupid questions. there are only stupid answers ;)
[/cliche]
as you said, most of us mugged up the answers for all your questions and vomited on +2 answer sheets. now we have to sit back and try 'n understand them.

Thursday, 07 December, 2006  
Blogger batt said...

http://mindeavour.blogspot.com/2006/12/cleansing-doors-of-perception.html#links

Saturday, 09 December, 2006  
Blogger batt said...

oops, i thot i'd paste that link in the Doors post, but anyways its relevant here too :-P

Saturday, 09 December, 2006  

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