5 Waves 51-1 Bow waves Although we have finished our quantitative analyses of waves, this added 51-1 Bow wayes chapter on the subject is intended to give some appreciation, qualitatively, for rious phenomena that are associated with waves, which are too complicated to 51-2 Shock waves analyze in detail here. Since we have been dealing with waves for several chapters 51-3 Waves in solid more properly the subject might be called "some of the more complex phenomena 51-4 Surface waves The first topic to be discussed concerns the effects that are produced by source of waves which is moving faster than the wave velocity, or the phase velocity Let us first consider waves that have a definite velocity, like sound and light. If we have a source of sound which is moving faster than the speed of sound, then mething like this happens Suppose at a given moment a sound wave is generated from the source at point x in Fig. 51-1; then, in the next moment, as the source moves to x2, the wave from x1 expands by a radius ri smaller than the distance hat the source moves; and of course, another wave starts from x2. when the sound source has moved still farther, to xa, and a wave is starting there, the wave from x 2 has now expanded to r2, and the one from xI has expanded to ra.Of course the thing is done continuously, not in steps, and therefore, we have a series of wave circles with a common tangent line which goes through the center of the generating were standing still, it generates a wavefront which forms a cone in three dimensions a pair of lines in two dimensions. The angle of the cone is very easy to figure out. In a given amount of time the source moves a distance, say x3-xl, pro- portional to u, the velocity of the source. In the meantime the wavefront has moved out a distance ra, proportional to cu, the speed of the wave. Therefore it is clear that the half-angle of opening has a sine equal to the ratio of the speed of the waves, Fig. 51-1. The shock wave front lies divided by the speed of the source, and this sine has a solution only if cw is less on a cone with apex at the source and than v, or the speed of the object is faster than the speed of the wave v/cao. 51.1) Incidentally, although we implied that it is necessary to have a source of sound, it turns out, very interestingly, that once the object is moving faster than the speed of sound, it will make sound. That is, it is not necessary that it have a certain tone vibrational character. Any object moving through a medium faster than the speed at which the medium carries waves will generate waves on each side, auto- matically, just from the motion itself. This is simple in the case of sound, but it also occurs in the case of light. At first one might think nothing can move faster than the speed of light. However, light in glass has a phase velocity less than the a charged particle of very high energy through a block of glass such that the particle velocity is close to the speed of light in a vacuum, while the speed of light in the glass may be only 3 the speed of light in the vacuum. a particle moving faster than the speed of light in the medium will produce a conical wave of light with its apex at the source, like the wave wake from a boat (which is from the same effect. as a matter of fact). By measuring the cone angle, we can determine the speed of the particle. This is used technically to determine the speeds of particles as one of the methods of determining their energy in high-energy research. The direction of the light is all that needs to be measured 5I-1