Slinky

It gets yanked forward, it accelerates, catching back up to the lead satellite, and the gap compresses back to normal.

It's like a cosmic game of Slinky.

Yes.

They stretch apart as the first one hits the gravity pump, and then they compress together as the second one hits that exact same bump.

It's exactly like a Slinky.

Yeah.

And by constantly measuring these microscopic stretching and compressing motions between the two satellites as they orbit the globe over and over, scientists can map monthly fluctuations in the Earth's gravitational pull with shocking resolution.

Yeah.

Um, one other one we did was, um, we s- we were talking about how the platform, you know, could expand and grow with you, so we had these like Slinkys made.

I don't know if you're familiar with Slinky, it's like a coiled toy that you sort of play with, and it can go down the stairs or whatever.

And so again, before...

I love, you know, Madonna.

Kendall loves Slinkies.

And, Kendall, I've got another one for you.

One of the things I do love is the old, you know, I'm just into Americana, kind of.

If I constrain my medium at the other end, the wave reflects back at me.

See? Now, if I send continuous waves down the Slinky, they also reflect back and what I get is two waves, one moving away from me and one moving at me.

But obviously the rope can't be in both places at once, so as my incoming wave reflects back, I don't see both waves, I see a combination of the two.

The waves add when they're on top of each other and subtract when they're opposing one another.

Now that we've mastered standing waves, let's go back to our square plate.

If you look closely, there are places where the plate and the sand are moving a lot and places here where they're not moving at all.

These are nodes, just like the nodes that didn't move on our Slinky.

Here are the antinodes.

Yeah.

And it just, it, it's like you keep coming around on a, there's a toy here, um, I don't know if you had these when you were growing up, but it's a Slinky.

Yes, the Slinky.

So it's this spiral, so we might keep coming around to the same thing or the same lesson or the same challenge that we have in our life, but we're at a little bit higher perspective the next time we come around.

And so we just have more tools and more insight and more clarity and more love to go around whatever that issue is that we're experiencing.

So in a transverse wave, like a light wave, displacement of the wave moves perpendicular to the particles in that wave as they travel through some medium, whereas in a longitudinal wave, which would be something like a, a sound wave, the displacement of the wave is in the same direction as the bulk movement of particles in that medium.

And I think one of the best ways to visually see the difference between these two waves is through kinda the classic physics demonstration that you may have seen in, like, high school physics, where you take a Slinky and you push the very front of that Slinky and you see a wave propagate through the length of that Slinky.

And you can see that the bits of the Slinky that are moving and kind of propagating this wave are moving in the same direction as that wave down the whole length of the Slinky, a- and that's a longitudinal wave.

A transverse wave, on the other hand, is something where, like, you tie a rope to, you know, a, a desk or a table or something, and then you whip the rope up, and you'll see that wave kinda propagate across, hit the table, come back, and bounce back at you.

And if you were to look at a, a point on that rope, you'd see that as the wave travels lengthwise through that rope, the piece of that rope actually travels up as the wave hits it, and then it goes back down.

So as I said, sound waves are longitudinal waves, and at their most basic level, they are variations in pressure that travel as waves through the atmosphere.

And again, you can think about the sound waves as like Slinkies traveling through the air.

You know, there's gonna be areas in these waves where the Slinky is more compact, and that's gonna correspond to a region of high pressure, and this region on a sound wave is called a compression.

I mean, look at this.

You know, like with Slinkys, they should be able to go from hand to hand? No.

Shitty Slinky, 2 out of 10. also have this this is a series two plushie though we got all the different series i believe i feel like there's actually endless lanky box toys though i said that this is pretty much all of them but god only knows they they have endless stuff endless money once again none of them are rare we got a pink bottle of milk incredible sorry guys uh quick pop it break This is just sad.

Let's go into the donuts.

I d- I ...

My brain immediately went to Slinkys, and I know Slinkys came a lot later.

[laughs]

[laughs]