Once you understand that all vibrational energy is actually circular motion, then a number of otherwise mysterious things start to become very simple.<\/p>\n
For example, the other day a friend posed the following puzzler: We all know that when you make a short burst of sound (say, by clapping your hands together), the sound impulse radiates out into an ever expanding sphere — since the sound goes in all directions. Logically it would seem that the loudness of that sound, when heard from some particular distance, should drop off as 1 \/ distance2<\/sup>, since the surface of the expanding sphere increases as distance2<\/sup>, so the sound should be diffused by that much. For example, you’d think that a clap from twice as far away would sound only one fourth as loud.<\/p>\n But that’s not what happens. In fact, the loudness of the sound drops off only as 1 \/ distance. For example, a clap from twice as far away sounds half as loud.<\/p>\n What’s going on here? It happens this way because a sound wave is actually a kind of circular motion. I’ll explain the rest tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once you understand that all vibrational energy is actually circular motion, then a number of otherwise mysterious things start to become very simple. For example, the other day a friend posed the following puzzler: We all know that when you make a short burst of sound (say, by clapping your hands together), the sound impulse … Continue reading “Clapping hands”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8006"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8006"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8011,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8006\/revisions\/8011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}