The Wave Equation

http://www.johnrhenry.com/wave.htm

John's Cool Derivation of the Wave Equation

by John "I am not a slave to fashion and it shows" Henry

The prerequisite for this page is a little bit of calculus and the ability to concentrate for 10 minutes.
The wave equation is important in physics. Here is my little derivation of the wave equation which I think is cool. My derivations are less
abstruse than most.
The function, y = sin(), is a statement saying that the dependent variable y is a function of the independent variable . In other words, y
depends on for its value, and sin() is the function that generates the value of y. is an angle measured in radians, and sin() is of course a
trig function. is a greek letter representing an angle and can be pronounced "fee" as do many hill billy engineers, physicists and
mathematicians or it can be properly pronounced "fie" as do English teachers. Fee fie fo fum who cares...
So, what is a radian? Measuring and describing angles in degrees was invented by humans and was arbitrarily defined by dividing a circle into
360 equal parts. In a mathematical sense, degrees are silly and more or less meaningless. A geometric way of defining angles that is not
arbitrary is by radians. A radian is the angle between two radial lines where the length of the arc is equal to the length of the radius. If you cut a
piece of pie so that the length of the crust equals the radius then you have one radian of pie. If for some odd reason you want to know how
many degrees a radian is, divide 360 by 2 because there are 2 radiuses contained in the circumference of a circle and there are 360 degrees in
the complete circle. This means that 1 radian equals 360/2 = 57.296 degrees.
The function sin() varies from -1 to +1 as follows: sin(0) = 0, sin(/2) = 1, sin() = 0, sin(3/2) = -1, sin(2) = 1 and sin(2) = 0. See the
graph of y = sin() below which I drew using the computer program Logo because I love torturing myself and wasting time with math and
computers.

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The Wave Equation

http://www.johnrhenry.com/wave.htm

We could add a coefficient to our function as follows: y = a sin(), where "a" represents the maximum amplitude of the wave. In other words,
when = /2, a sin(/2) = a, when = 3/2, a sin(3/2) = -a, etc.
Notice that the wave passes through y = 0 at = 0, then climbs up to y = +1 at = /2, then descends back down passing through y = 0 at =
, then continues down to y = -1 at = 3/2, then climbs back up and passes through y = 0 at = 2. The distance (in angle) from = 0 to
= 2 is one complete cycle and is known as one wave length. One complete cycle or one wave length is 2 radians in anglular measure. The
length or distance of one wave length is designated by the greek symbol (lambda) and is in units of length such as meters or feet or whatever.
Since the wave length corresponds to an angle of = 2 we can calibrate the linear dimension of wave length to the angular measure of
wavelength by using the expression (2/) x. Notice that when we substitute x = into this expression we get an angle of = 2. If we
substitute x = /2 we get an angle of = , etc. So now we can write our wave function as in terms of and x as:
y = sin (2/) x
where x is a point along the x axis, y is the ordinate, and the expression (2/)x produces the angle .
Now for my cool derivation. Suppose we have two coordinate systems, an X-Y system and an X'-Y' system arranged so that their x axes
coincide. Further suppose that the X'-Y' system is moving to the right in the positive x direction at velocity v with respect to the X-Y
coordinate system. Thus we have the following classical transformations between these two coordinate systems:

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The Wave Equation

http://www.johnrhenry.com/wave.htm

x = x' + vt
y = y'
solving for x' we have
x' = x - vt
Suppose we have a sine wave, similar to that shown above, fixed in the X'-Y' coordinate system, given by the equation
y' = a sin (2/) x'.
Since the X'-Y' coordinate system is moving in the X-Y system at velocity v, we could view this as a sine wave moving through the X-Y plane
as a function of time. By substituting x' = x - vt into the equation for x we get the equation of the "moving" sine wave in the X-Y system as,
y = a sin [(2/)( x - vt)]
Now for some very basic dynamics. The first derivative of a function with respect to time is interpreted as velocity, and the second derivative
with respect to time is interpreted as acceleration. [When I was in college I realized that the speedometer in your car is a differentializer. If you
are going at a constant speed, the needle of your speedometer is at rest. Your car is moving at a constant velocity but the speedometer needle is
at rest. If you speed up (accelerate) the speedometer needle moves at a constant velocity. I got excited and tried to tell other engineers about
my discovery but nobody seemed interested in my observation. A physics professor was, however, very amused by it.]
Taking the first and second partial derivatives of the expression y = a sin [(2/)( x - vt)] with respect to x and then taking the first and second
partial derivatives with respect to t, we get the following partial derivatives:
a cos [(2/)( x - vt)]

and
- a v cos [(2/)( x - vt)]

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The Wave Equation

http://www.johnrhenry.com/wave.htm

Taking the second partial derivatives we obtain,

-a sin [(2/)( x - vt)]

-a v2 sin [(2/)( x - vt)]

From the above two expressions we can readily see that the second is equal to the first but multiplied by v2. Therefore we have,

Rearranging this expression we get:

which is the second order partial differential equation known as the "wave equation."
the acceleration of the wave in the y direction

is the rate of change of slope of the tangent to the wave, which in a sense is the rate of curvature.

Cool...

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