Let’s set the stage. Your team names signify common types of waves:

• The Rockets really should be spelled "rock it"s, representing mechanical waves, or vibrations, like a plucked guitar string. These waves propagate through solids.
• The Heat represents electromagnetic waves, like light, heat waves, and x-rays. These EM waves can propagate through empty space.
• The Sonics represent pressure waves, which are usually associated with sound, as expansions and compressions push forward through a medium like air or water (for example, perhaps you’ve heard the sound of whales singing, or you’ve heard of SONAR, by which submarines use underwater sound to know when other submarines are near).

But, there is another sort of wave, which occurs at the interface between two media. These are transverse waves, which oscillate up and down, even though the wave is traveling side-to-side. The most common example is the water wave.

(If you have trouble picturing what longitudinal and transverse mean, don’t worry - you’ll see both in the Slinky lab.)

During our experimentation, we will investigate some of the physics of water waves:

1. We will encounter lots of wave vocabulary, like diffraction, reflection, refraction, interference, wavelength, and amplitude. The really important thing to get out of all these words is that certain behaviors are common to all kinds of waves. For example, light waves interfere, causing bright and dark spots; but sound waves also interfere and create harmony, and when water waves interfere you can get either a really big wave or no wave at all (the same is true for waves in ropes and slinkys).
2. We’ll explain the ordinary waves we see. Ocean waves generally form in deep water, where they travel as rolling waves. But in shallow water, they become crashing waves. We can watch this happen at the beach, as a rolling wave approaches shore, gets taller, and crashes. As the wave enters shallower water, it starts feeling bottom (that’s really the technical term for it), and friction against the ground slows the bottom of the wave down, so that the top of the wave crashes over it.
3. We will also consider some special cases for water waves, like storms and rocks and tidal waves. We’ll see why understanding these waves can be important to us (especially in a boat!).

WATER WAVES: An Exploration: Results

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