# Tag Info

520

So, I decided to try it out. I used Audacity to record ~5 seconds of sound that resulted when I dropped a penny, nickel, dime and quarter onto my table, each 10 times. I then computed the power spectral density of the sound and obtained the following results: I also recorded 5 seconds of me not dropping a coin 10 times to get a background measurement. ...

208

If you have the dimensions and material of an object, you can compute both the mass and the normal vibration modes. Just the mass is not enough - a large paper "coin" will have a different fundamental frequency than a small tungsten sphere. A summary of everything that comes below - the result of several edits, and including a nice interaction with the ...

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If there were only one prong (imagine holding a metal rod in your hand), then the oscillation energy of the prong would quickly be dissipated by its contact with your hand. On the other hand, a fork with two prongs oscillates in such a way that the point of contact with your hand does not move much due to the oscillation of the fork. This causes the ...

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I am by no means an expert in tuning fork design, but here are some physical considerations: Different designs may have different "purities," but don't take this too far. It is certainly possible to tune to something not a pure tone; after all, orchestras usually tune to instruments, not tuning forks. Whatever mode(s) you want to excite, you don't want to ...

37

This is not an advertisement. Under the rubric of "do try this at home", I wanted to share one more thing that I discovered after writing my previous answer - but it is so unrelated to that answer that I thought it better to write this as a separate post. I discovered two interesting things. First, when you spin a coin on a hard surface, it "rings" with ...

23

Q. How do two coupled vibrating prongs isolate a single frequency? howstuffworks.com has an article on How Tuning Forks Work The way a tuning fork's vibrations interact with the surrounding air is what causes sound to form. When a tuning fork's tines are moving away from one another, it pushes surrounding air molecules together, forming small, high-...

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The energy levels of a diatomic molecule are $E = 2B, 6B, 12B$ and so on, where $B$ is: $$B = \frac{\hbar^2}{2I}$$ Most of the mass of the molecule is in the nuclei, so when calculating the moment of inertia $I$ we can ignore the electrons and just use the nuclei. But the size of the nuclei is around $10^{-5}$ times smaller than the bond length. This ...

11

The analogy is a very good one, because heat transfer is in fact modelled by phonons, which you could also use to describe sound waves. The crucial difference is that sound waves have a much longer wavelength (at least in the range of some millimetres) than thermal phonons (not more than a few orders of magnitude bigger than the atomic lattice scale). These ...

11

Damping implies a loss mechanism. In liquids, where molecules move freely in close proximity, this loss mechanism is a transfer of momentum from one molecule to another. In pure crystalline metals, the position of atoms in the lattice is fixed, and the forces between them are elastic. That is, if an atom is displaced, it will experience a force that puts it ...

9

What you are seeing on the square plate are the resonant modes of the structure. Each of these modes has a particular frequency associated with it, and is rung up when the plate is driven at that frequency. These resonant modes act like standing waves on a string: where some parts of the plate are moving a lot while other parts are standing still. The sand ...

9

I'd like to point out the example of cast iron. It is renowned for its excellent vibration-damping properties. It is wrong to reach a blanket conclusion saying that metals are bad for vibration damping. The properties of any solid depends part on the material it is made up of and part on the micro-structure of the material. By micro-structure, I mean the ...

8

What do you think a $\Delta^+$ or $\Delta^0$ is, if not an excited nucleon? (To be sure the $^{++}$ and $^{-}$ states do not correspond directly to a nucleon, because there is no allowed lower spin state with that valence content.) The thing I am not sure about is how closely these excitation match the ones you are envisioning. They match nuclear excitation ...

8

I don't mean to take anything away from the previous great answers, but the "simple and to the point" answer is, a very qualified, yes. By qualified, I mean one must know the coin's composition, thickness, diameter(or shape), density distribution, country of manufacture, etc. If we make assumptions and restrictions, then it becomes possible to calculate ...

7

The forces on the screw are not symmetric. Once the screw is no longer turning loosely in the hole tightening the screw compresses the two materials held together (i.e. increases the stress on the material, i.e. stores energy in the material), while loosening reduced the compression (i.e. releases the stress). So a random dislocation will be more likely to ...

7

Sound waves do generate changes in temperature because the propagation of sound is an approximately isentropic process. Keep in mind though that changes in static temperature can very well occur without the generation of heat. Moreover, the pressure changes associated with sound waves are of such a small magnitude that the observable temperature changes are ...

6

looking at the link you gave, I think it is just a problem of name convention and has nothing to do with oversimplifications. It was indeed ruled out that the reason of the failure was not due to a resonance phenomenon called the Kármán vortex street, a phenomenon arising in fluiddynamics with a certain resonance frequency, called the Strouhal frequency. ...

5

The amount of energy lost to vibration in a car engine is typically very small. You can see this easily because the vibration (and the energy associated with it) is dissipated in the engine mounts, and if any significant amount of energy were being dissipated the engine mounts would get hot, which they don't. Most of the inefficiency is because the ...

5

Put more simply: sound waves are attenuated as they propagate through air (this is more easily measured for very short wavelengths, e.g. ultrasound). This means they lose energy - which is turned into heat of the air. The amount of heating, however, is very very small. Let's do the math. A sound wave of 120 dB (really loud) has energy of only $1 \frac{W}{m^... 5 Normally, suspension consists of a damping component and a spring component. For such a suspension, higher speed means higher acceleration and greater force. Driving faster will cause a bigger jolt. However, high end cars these days use active suspension - and that changes everything. With active suspension, you can either respond quickly to bumps in the ... 4 No, because in a vacuum, there is no way for the two tuning forks (I think you meant this, rather than pendulums) to communicate. The reason a second tuning fork with the same resonance frequency will begin resonating is because, physically, sound waves are hitting it at its natural frequency. Sound waves travel in a medium, so in a vacuum, there's nothing ... 4$y(\theta) = A\sin \theta+ B \cos \theta$is known as the simple harmonic function. All the motions which can be represented by this function are known as simple harmonic motions. Motion of a simple pendulum is approximately a simple harmonic motion for small amplitudes. It stops vibrating after some-time due to drag from air i.e. loss of energy. But, we ... 4 I tried it actually on my bed, a wood floor, a wood table, and a tiled floor. On the tiled floor, I didn't feel the vibration, on the rest it was clear. I believe the reason for the difference is the difference in the elasticity of the materials. For materials with high elasticity, the wave is transmitted more than reflected, on the other hand, for materials ... 4 Taste and smell are mediated by receptors in your body that molecules can attach to. These receptors then give off an electrical signal which is translated in the brain to a certain taste or smell. The details of this are biological and not of importance here. So no, there is no relevant frequency or even wave-like behavior. Touch is a very different thing. ... 4 When you release the plucked string, its shape is momentarily triangular: tied down at the ends and pointed at the location of your finger. But the solutions to the wave equation are not triangle functions, but sinusoidal functions, whose displacements from rest obey $$y_n(x) \propto \sin \frac{2\pi x}{\lambda_0 / n},$$ where$\lambda_0\$ is twice the ...

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The trouble is that your table, or whatever object it is, will act as a waveguide. That's because the sound waves will (partially) reflect of the wood/air surface then travel back into the table and interfere with other waves. The result is going to be hideously complicated to calculate. As Luboš says in a comment, if the thickness of the table is much less ...

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The equation of motion for a driven oscillator is $$m\ddot{x}+r\dot{x}+kx-F_0 \cos\omega t =0$$ It can be rewritten as $$\textrm{Re}\left[m\ddot{x}+r\dot{x}+kx-F_0 e^{i\omega t}\right]=0$$ The idea is to solve the complexified equation (because it is easier), then take the real part to get a desired solution for the original equation. Also, how can ...

4

This is a common trick used in linear differential equations with an inhomogeneous driving term. It's easier to algebraically manipulate complex exponentials than sines and cosines, and if you take the real part of the solution at the end, you end up at the same place anyway. One way to think of it is that by replacing the real-valued functions with complex-...

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Neutrons interact with each other only via exchange interaction Neutrons interact via the strong and weak forces. At low energies the interaction is principally via the nuclear force, or residual strong force, which derives ultimately from the strong force interactions between quarks. This can be described as an effective force due to the exchange of ...

3

In classical mechanics, you can describe a crystal (in some approximation) by a Hamiltonian that is a quadratic form in coordinates and momenta of atoms. After you diagonalize this quadratic form, you obtain a Hamiltonian of a set of independent, rather than coupled, oscillators (modes). Then you can quantize this system and you do get zero-point energy for ...

3

Regardless of whether the "local" situation is symmetric or not with respect to loosening and tightening, what you essentially have is a random walk. At any point in time, the screw can stay where it is, get a little looser or get a little tighter. There is, in practical terms, a limit as to how tight the screw can get but no limit on how loose. For any ...

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