When a wave travels from one medium to another, it gets reflected at the boundary of the second medium. A common example of this is when a person yells at a distance from a cliff and hears the echo of their voice. The sound waves (longitudinal waves) traveling in the air are reflected from the bounding cliff. Similarly, flipping one end of a string whose other end is tied to a wall causes a pulse (transverse wave) to travel through the string, which gets reflected upon reaching the wall. In...

The human ear cannot distinguish between two sources of sound if they happen to reach within a specific time interval, typically 0.1 seconds apart. More than this, and they are perceived as separate sources.
Imagine the sound is reflected back to the ears. Assuming that the source is very close to the human, the difference between hearing the two sounds—the emitted sound and the reflected sound—may be more than the minimum time for perceiving distinct sounds. If this is the case, then the...

The concept of the looking-glass self describes how an individual's self-concept is shaped by their perception of how others see them. This psychological theory, first introduced by sociologist Charles Horton Cooley in 1902, posits that self-identity emerges in a social context and is influenced by the judgments—real or imagined—of others.Research suggests that individuals frequently overestimate how positively others perceive them. This is particularly evident in physical self-perception,...

Forgetting is a complex cognitive phenomenon influenced by several factors, among which interference and decay are particularly prominent. These processes explain why individuals often struggle to retrieve specific information from memory, leading to lapses in recall that can be observed in everyday situations.
Interference occurs when competing memories hinder the retrieval of particular information. It can be classified into two types: proactive and retroactive interference. Proactive...

An ellipse is formed when a right circular cone is intersected by an inclined plane that does not cut through its base. This intersection yields a closed, symmetric curve characterized by distinctive geometric properties. Most notably, an ellipse is defined as the collection of all points in a plane for which the combined distances to two fixed points—called the foci—remain constant.The ellipse features two principal axes: the major and the minor axes. The major axis is the longest diameter,...

In three-dimensional analytic geometry, a line can be fully described using vector equations when both a point on the line and its direction are known. This approach has practical applications in fields such as engineering and surveying, where precise spatial modeling is essential. For instance, a laser beam from a surveying instrument directed across a construction site can be modeled mathematically as a line using vectors.Let the laser beam originate from a known point P₀, represented by the...