Vibrations and Waves in Physics

Third edition of one of our most successful undergraduate texts in physics.

Iain G. Main (Author)

9780521447010, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 July 1993

380 pages, 164 b/w illus. 4 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.502 kg

"...[has] gone beyond the diet of springs and strings that dominates the traditional, unimaginative waves-and-oscillations course....[brings] in plenty of real-world applications such as transmission of electromagnetic waves, and lead[s] the reader to quantum theory in a mainly painless introduction." Tania Monteiro, New Scientist

For the third edition of this successful undergraduate text, the author has made a number of changes to improve the presentation and clarify some of the arguments, and has also brought several of the applications up to date. The new material includes an elementary, descriptive introduction to the ideas behind the new science of chaos. The overall objectives of the book are unchanged: to lead the student to a thorough understanding of the basic concepts of vibrations and waves, to show how these concepts unify a wide variety of familiar physics, and to open doors to advanced topics which they illuminate. Each section of the book contains a brief summary of its salient contents. There are approximately 180 problems to which all numerical answers are provided, together with hints for their solution. This book is designed both for use as a text for an initial undergraduate course on vibrations and waves, and for a reference at later stages when more advanced topics or applications are met.

1. Free vibrations
2. Free vibrations in physics
3. Damping
4. Damping in physics
5. Forced vibrations
6. Forced vibrations in physics
7. Anharmonic vibrations
8. Two-coordinate vibrations
9. Non-dispersive waves
10. Non-dispersive waves in physics
11. Fourier theory
12. Dispersion
13. Water waves
14. Electromagnetic waves
15. De Broglie waves
16. Solitary waves
17. Plane waves at boundaries
18. Diffraction
Answers to problems, and hints for solution
Constants and units
Index.

Subject Areas: Wave mechanics [vibration & acoustics PHDS]