4-30-09

Today, I walked into Physics surprised to see there were no new papers to pick up. Mr. Manning then told the class we were going to do the lab on page 18 from the day before called The Speed of a Wave. The lab tests two different methods of finding the speed of a wave. The class read over the lab and predicted the answers to the questions at the top of the page. The questions are 1. will both methods give us the same results and 2. will the frequency of the standing wave affect our speed measurements? I predicted yes, both methods will give us the same results and yes, the frequency will affect speed.

The lab involves giant slinkies so everyone moved the desks and the lab tables against the walls in order to have enough room to work. then in groups of three or four, we got started. One important thing in this lab is to keep the same distance on the slinky. We were told each floor tile is one foot, so we counted the number of tiles and doubled it because we need to count the distance of the wave to the end and back to the beginning. Then we converted the measurement to meters and timed the different types of waves.

At the end of the lab, we found that both methods don't produce the same wave speeds and that the frequency does affect speed measurements. As frequency increases, wave speed also increases.

These are what the waves looked like for the different methods: