[ExI] And Meta You Know

[Jef Allbright]

On Jan 24, 2008 12:36 PM, Antonio Marcos <amcmr2003 at yahoo.com.br> wrote:
>
> --- hkhenson <hkhenson at rogers.com> escreveu:
>
> > A really heavy rope would act like the
> > lighter rope being
> > tied to a building, the closer the ropes were in
> > mass per unit of
> > length, the smaller the reflection.
> >
>
> i suppose you mean the wave coming from the lighter
> end of the connection. what if i sent the wave from
> the heavy rope, would it still receive reflection or
> only the lighter rope would get a stonger wave?

Mark (or Antonio), welcome to the Extropy chat list!

In the case of a pulse transmitted through a heavy rope into a
lower-density rope, the energy arriving at the lower density rope will
induce a **longer-wavelength** pulse traveling forward along the light
rope, and a reflected longer-wavelength pulse back through the heavier
rope toward the origin.  From this it should be apparent that in any
case of impedance mismatch, the coupling of energy is relatively
inefficient.  To carry the analogy perhaps further than it should go,
the reflected energy will travel back to the origin and then be
reflected again toward the "load", losing energy over multiple trips
only due to the "resistance" of the rope, corresponding to the
relatively inefficient higher-order "standing and waving" that might
accompany inefficient face-to-face communication between people.

- Jef