Reason For Accuracy
A less accurate method of determining wavelength with a tube, used before Kundt, is simply to measure the length of the tube at resonance, which is approximately equal to a multiple of a half wavelength. The problem with this method is that when a tube of air is driven by a sound source, its length at resonance is not exactly equal to a multiple of the half-wavelength. Because the air at the source end of the tube, next to the speaker's diaphragm, is vibrating, it is not exactly at a node (point of zero amplitude) of the standing wave. The node actually occurs some distance beyond the end of the tube. Kundt's method allowed the actual locations of the nodes to be determined with great accuracy.
Read more about this topic: Kundt's Tube
Famous quotes containing the words reason for, reason and/or accuracy:
“A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)