not just any waves in general but for electromagnetic
electromagnetic
radiation the multiplication of
the wavelength and the frequency will
give actually a fixed
speed so if we take
for electromagnetic radiation wavelength
times frequency
we use the the the
variable c and this is actually the
speed of light
and so this is a fundamental constant of
the value 2.998
times 10 to the 8th meters per second
we could have more significant figures
but this 4 sig figs
is is going to be good for most purposes
okay so why don't we go ahead and apply
this uh
right away to a practice problem um so
here we're going to be determining the
frequency and wavelength
of radiation so you can pause the video now
now
and work on this problem uh and then
uh resume the video once so you can compare
compare
so what i'm going to do here is i'm
going to start by
revisiting the calculation or the the
equation that i just wrote so wavelength
times frequency
is equal to c the speed of light we are given
given
up here um a wavelength
and we're given a conversion factor so
and we know that the speed of light is a
constant so what we need to do is solve for
for
or isolate frequency so frequency
is going to be equal to the speed of light
light
c over uh lambda the wavelength
so uh one way to do this is to just go
ahead and
plug in what we have 2.998 times
10 to the 8th meters per
second i'm actually going to change my notation
notation
quickly so the speed of light
is given in meters per second that's the
units um
you can also write this as meters times
uh reciprocal seconds okay so that that
is really useful
um sometimes for dimensional analysis
problems keeping track of what's a
numerator unit what's a denominator unit
so that's the the speed of light divided
by the wavelength of 589
nanometers now personally uh
i would convert this nanometer value to
meters first before putting this in but
i want to show you that you can actually
handle this
um in in using a dimensional analysis type
type
of approach but keep in mind that the
nanometers down here will not cancel out
with the meters up on top
because they're not the same unit we
actually have to
uh fix this problem so
to cancel nanometers on the bottom over
here i'm going to write nanometers up on
the top to cancel
meters on the numerator to the left i'm
going to write meters
in the denominator here
so the conversion factor we could do a
couple different things but i'll stick with
with
1 meter is equal to
actually let's use the conversion factor
given to us by um the problem here
so we have um one nanometer is equal to
one times ten to the negative nine meter
let's just use that conversion
so now what we can do is let's always
check that our units cancel out
meters will cancel out with meters over
here nanometers cancel out with
nanometers over here
okay so this is the dimensional analysis
part we treat the units
as if they are being modified by
multiplication and division
uh okay so if you do this what you
should get
is a value of 5.09
times 10 to the 14th
per second per second is the only unit left
left
okay so that's that's a frequency so
does this answer make sense yes
it does all right to wrap up this video
i really
briefly just want to discuss quantization
quantization
and the definition is on your screen it
is where only discrete values from a
more general set of continuous values of
some property
are observed okay what does that mean
so let's take the case of a standing
wave these black circles on the left and
right are fixed points they are not
moving to
to jostle the the weight if one of them
was moving to jostle the wave then you
might get a traveling wave where
a peak moves from left to right but
since they're both locked there
and let's say some other energy source
is being used to
to um uh move this rope
uh to provide a standing wave well what
happens is we can only have certain frequencies
frequencies
in this particular case for a standing
wave why is that the case
well we can see here that
in the most simplest wave form there is no
no
node right there is a peak
and a trough and it is simply just
inverting between those two
okay with fixed points on the left and
the right
so we can say here that the node
is zero but if we want to
jump up to uh one node now in the next case
case
okay if we want to actually increase the
frequency of this standing wave
to get it to one node there's only uh
we can't pick any frequency that's
higher than the
than the first waveform we actually have
to pick
a very discrete frequency to get up to
one node okay so for one node
two nodes or three nodes these correspond
correspond
to discrete frequencies to get to these
points okay
so um let's just say
to discrete
for each i'll call it
a wave form okay that's just a different
type of standing wave that we have
so each waveform here corresponds to a
discrete frequency
that is an example of quantization
because in theory
you know for traveling waves we can we
can have
um a huge spectrum of frequencies we can
almost have you have as many frequencies
as you could possibly
think of for electromagnetic radiation
um the only thing that will happen with
the frequency is that the wavelength
will change inversely
but for standing waves where the ends
are fixed
that is the case where only certain
frequencies will enable that waveform to exist
exist
this is quantization and this is going
to be a really
key part of understanding the electronic
structure of matter
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