Traveling Waves and Their Characteristics

A traveling wave, also called a progressive wave, is a disturbance that moves through space, transporting energy without transporting matter. When you drop a stone into a pond, ripples spread outward, but a floating leaf simply bobs up and down in place rather than being carried to the shore. The water itself does not travel with the wave; only the disturbance and its energy move outward. This is the essential idea behind every wave, whether it is a ripple on water, a sound in air, or light from a distant star.

Waves arise because a disturbance at one point sets neighboring points into oscillation, which in turn disturb their neighbors, and so on. Each particle of the medium performs simple harmonic motion about its own equilibrium position, slightly out of step with its neighbors. The res