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Would it take any time for a transverse wave to travel the length of a massless rope? Why?

2007-02-01 10:00:53 · 4 answers · asked by lifewithgooli 1 in Science & Mathematics Physics

4 answers

Yes. Divide the length of the rope by the speed of light. Any kind of massless particle (or resonance or wave or whatever) will travel at the speed of light.

When you study waves on a rope, you usually use a classical picture where the speed goes up to infinity as the mass goes down. This classical model obviously has to fail at some point for very small mass (or it would violate relativity).

2007-02-01 10:11:18 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

Your question is a bit confusing - first, transverse mechanical waves need materia to travel, so no mass means no waves exist.
On the other hand, if you take the equation of the speed for transverse wave on a rope c = sqrt(F x l / m), we can see that no mass would mean infinite speed.
However, this is a classical picture of the problem, because as we know, no wave can travel faster than a light in a vacuum.

2007-02-01 10:11:45 · answer #2 · answered by Dorian36 4 · 1 0

There is no such thing as a "Mass less" rope. Everything that is, was, and will be, is made of matter and all matter has mass. So there would be no ripple at all. (But some say that one cannot always sense every kind of atom or molicule so look up on the internet "Dark matter" to see what that would be about.)

2007-02-01 10:27:01 · answer #3 · answered by Jenna L 2 · 0 0

A massless rope doesn't exist.

2007-02-01 10:30:37 · answer #4 · answered by futureastronaut1 3 · 0 0

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