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Physics 152: Oscillations and Waves

Michael Fowler UVa

PDF of notes on Oscillations and Waves

Lectures and Applets on Oscillations and Waves

1. From Complex Numbers to the Simple Harmonic Oscillator PDF Applet

Complex numbers are the key to analyzing oscillations and waves easily.

2. Heavily Damped Simple Harmonic Oscillator Applet

Surprisingly, the heavily damped case is the easiest mathematically, and has some interesting physics.

3. Lightly and Critically Damped Oscillations Applet

From ringing a bell to checking your shocks.

4. Driven Damped Oscillators Applet

From picking up a cell signal to wrecking a bridge.

PDF of the above three lectures

5, The Pendulum PDF

6. Introducing Waves: Strings and Springs PDF

Kinds of waves in one dimension: transverse, longitudinal, traveling, standing.

7. Analyzing Waves PDF Applet

How applying F = ma to a little piece of string leads to an equation that describes many different waves.

8. Boundary Conditions PDF Applet

What happens to a wave when it reaches the end of the string?

9. Sound Waves PDF Applet

Deriving the Wave Equation for sound waves in a pipe. Energy density and power in a sound wave in a pipe.

10. Waves in Two and Three Dimensions PDF Applet

Extending the Wave Equation to higher dimensions.Huygens' picture of wave propagation.Young's two-slit measurement of the wavelength of light. Applet

11. The Doppler Effect PDF Applet

Other Course Materials

Spreadsheets

I found in teaching this course in the past that constructing Excel spreadsheets and exploring with them proved useful in building intuition. Possibly this approach is being superseded by, say, using Python. Anyway, here are the spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet for Damped Oscillator

This spreadsheet plots the motion of a damped oscillator: you can specify the initial conditions and degree of damping, and find critical damping.

Spreadsheet for Damped Driven Oscillator

An external driving force is added to the previous spreadsheet: see how damping and resonance compete.

Pendulum Spreadsheet

Find out how the period of a real pendulum varies with the amplitude.