Yellow Waves

This summer, I went to Arizona where we did a lot of driving. There were tons of open fields filled with either grass or wild flowers. As the elevation increased, it got windier. When the wind blew the flowers in the open fields, it looked like there were waves. We've studied two kinds of waves so far, transverse and longitudinal. These paricular waves that I saw in the fields were longitudinal, meaning that the waves traveled across from left to right and so did the flowers. Transverse waves are the opposite in a sense that while the wave travels across from left to right, the object creating the wave moves up and down. An example of a transverse wave would be a flag.

The Doppler Effect

A few weeks ago, I visited the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a NASCAR racetrack. I got to watch cars speed around the track and I also rode in one. As the cars went around the track, the motors made a loud vroom noise and I noticed that the cars demonstrated the Doppler Effect. While watching from the pit, I could hear a change in pitch and volume while the car approached me and then sped passed me. They sounded like the motors made different noises as they drove by. However, when I was actually in the car, I realized that the motor made a constant vroom and sounded the same the entire time.

As the cars drive by, you can hear the sound of the motor change.

From inside the car, the engine makes a constant roar.