Particle Pulses Mental Model of Waves
Particle Pulses Mental Model of Waves
- A large fraction of students in university physics bring in/create a model of waves on a string that treat a pulse as a unary object imposed on a medium, rather than as an image of the mediums time-dependent response to a disturbance.
- The object’s speed depends on its creation.
- The superposition of two such objects only occurs when the “label points” (peaks) overlap. (Wittmann, Steinberg, and Redish)