Sometimes waves do not seem to move; rather, they just vibrate in place. Unmoving waves can be seen on the surface of a glass of milk kept in a refrigerator, which is one example of standing waves. Vibrations from the refrigerator motor create waves on the milk that oscillate up and down but do not seem to move across the surface. These waves are formed or created by the superposition of two or more identical moving waves in opposite directions. The waves move through each other, with their...

Viscous forces, like friction, are intermolecular forces that resist the relative motion of molecules over each other. When a solid body moves through a liquid, viscous forces drag it in the opposite direction. The force's magnitude depends on the solid's shape and size, as well as its speed and the liquid's coefficient of viscosity, density and temperature.
The expression for the force on a solid spherical object in a fluid is called Stokes' law. Stokes' law is valid only for low Reynolds...

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...

In the years before Newton, a general belief prevailed that different laws governed objects in the sky than objects on Earth. When Kepler wrote down the three laws of planetary motion, explaining in detail the geometrical properties of the planetary orbits around the Sun, there was no immediate idea to discern their connection with more fundamental laws. It was Isaac Newton who, in 1665–66, figured out the connection between planetary motion, the motion of the moon around the Earth, and the...

Angular momentum characterizes an object's rotational motion and is defined as the moment of its linear momentum about a specified point O. When a particle moves along a curved path in the x-y plane, the scalar formulation calculates the magnitude of its angular momentum, utilizing the moment arm (d), representing the perpendicular distance from point O to the line of action of the linear momentum. Despite being scalar in formulation, angular momentum is inherently a vector quantity. Its...

In the early 17th century, German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler postulated three laws for the motion of planets in the solar system. In 1909, he formulated his first two laws based on the observations of his forebears, Nikolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. However, in 1918, he published his third law of planetary motion, which gives a precise mathematical relationship between a planet's average distance from the Sun and the amount of time it takes to revolve around the Sun. It...