Daniel Russels page gives an understandable description of " wave" reflection.
http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/reflect/reflect.htmlOf course it opts to call on Newton rather than actually explain.
To start with, a sine wave is not possible in a madium with no tensile attribution or property. In general no viscosity no sine wave. The only possible wave is thus longitudinal and the medium must therefore possess an elastic attribution. Again no viscosity no compression wave.
Simple compaction will transmit into a medium with no elasticity but the energy will be absorbed and dissipated by contiguous contact and the build up of affected inertial mass. The energy of the system may be constant but for the impacted medium what Newton called the measure of the quantity of motion.mv will be increased with no appreciable net velocity gain. Thus mv is a measure of the energy within a body, and the logarithm of mv
2 will be a type of temperature measure.
Temperature is usually a measure of heat pressure, that is the quantity of motion transmitted to a very motile fluid such as water or mercury. As it is usually measured in a small region it represents a proportion of the whole which is quite small. The method for accounting for small proportions was devised by Napier in his famous treatise on logarithms. Establishing a base for these types of logarithms requires a geometric proportion which is why mv
2 is used.
The input of temperature( heat pressure) into a medium results often in material property changes and usually the creation of viscosity. Once viscosity can be adduced then lastic and wave behaviours become possible and probable. Quite often a fine plasma envelops the impacting body as the inertial mass increases creating an elastic fluid reaction product that ejects past the impacting object taking a good proportion of the quantity of motion with it. The viscosity of this plasma has yet to be measured I think, but its presence is well attested.
Viscosity therefore is necessary to expound on any wave mechanical description, and if it is assumed not to exist, natural events seem bound to create the property.
Returning to the medium which permits compression waves but supposedly not transverse waves, the compression creates a viscosity / elasticity in such a medium. The chemistry of this product is usually ignored by physicists, but in fact it is quite important at the small scale. The injection of heat pressure encourages endothelial reactions which may be homeostatic, releasing the compression product in an rndothermal reaction , restoring the initial state. This is a viscous behaviour.
Newton spent a great deal of time and effort attempting to understand these chemical behaviours of materials. He wanted to know where the " stickiness" in matter came from. Unfortunately in fluids he assumed they were resistive media only and considered only lubricity, that is how easily an object passed through another. He dd not think that this was a function of stickiness or viscosity.
Thus we can expound upon compression waves in terms of a measure of elasticity. As for gases this elasticity was renowned and called pressure. Boyles Gas pressure laws helped to account for sound compression waves. Waves at ths time meant like we see in water! Newton in fact used a very elegant water vapour demonstration of waves in gases based on the humidity of a gas, which was observed to vary with pressure.
The viscosity of a gas was yet to be explained, and it was Maxwell whose velocity probability distribution , based on Boltzmanns observations, that gave Kelvin the grist for his kinetic theory of gases. The viscosity was locked away in the energy density due to the contraction of volume. It took a while for viscosity to become isolated as a general factor in wave propagation.
Light however was thought to be different. Descartes felt it was a wave propagation like all the others, but Newton felt it was a ballistic rø paganism of corpuscles. He saw or refused to see any evidence of water or harbour waves. Grimaldi on the other hand believed he had detected them in a phenomenon he called diffraction.
The problem arose because no one saw any reason to admit rotation into the general discussion on waves. Compression waves were all assumed to bunch up like water. Nobody actually investigated water to see what it was doing until waves became important.
When they were investigated, chiefly by the fluid mechanics, Helmholtz, Navier Stokes Rayleigh it became obvious that rotation was involved. But by then Fresnel had accounted for light by means of sine" waves" nd insisted transverse motion was ll that could properly account for it. Young believed that longitudinal motion had to be involved but he was overruled.
Rayleigh demonstrated that longitudinal motion was involved but he was marginalised to the seismic community and later the radio engineers!
In fact Ray,eight demonstrated that at a surface rolling waves were the solution.
We can now return to compression waves and add in the left out rotation factors. All compression involves some element of rotation, and in fact strain methods account for the behaviours of materials using strain ellipsoids..the viscosity of the material effects the behavioural outcome, especially when viscosity is known to behave rotationally!
Finally we address the wave motion in a tensile medium.
The medium is viscous because of its tensile nature. This means compressive and rotational moments of force are resisted viscously, ie elastically. Providing the viscous modulus is not breached a medium has a restorative force behaviour. Hooke is the most famous scientist to use this to describe force, it is often overlooked that Newton derived his force measure from Hookes observation. Hooke was interested in statics, Neeton in Dynmics, thus he observed what Hooke factored out, the accelerations involved in these restorative forces.
In many senses inertia means Hookes steady spring state, that is a force equilibrium. Newton just observed that inertia is achieved over time as forces tend toward equilibrium.. Acceleration thus was the determiner of that active principle called force with celerity or velocity bring the result of force.
When Newton observed that rest and uniform motion were both equilibrium states he opened the eyes of engineers forevermore! The question of why objects continue moving when no force is applied was quickly forgotten. Newtons philosophical causes Motive and celerity were removed from consideration by simple measurement! His formulae derived from his deep thinking were good enough to build bridges with! Let the philosophers ponder the rest!
So in a tensile medium any change in the balance of equilibrium results in a restorative force that is equal and opposite. The behaviour of the system under these conditions produces oscillations that damp down. The reason for this Newton observed is complex but it is a redistribution of the quantity of motion often resulting in a rise in heat pressure.
The actual chemical and viscous behaviour was not examined until fluid Dynamics started to be computationally possible.
In the tensile material long chains of material are linked by electro Thermo magneto dynamics. As the material is deformed these chains are stressed or compressed . They behave viscously, that is like springs. The rounding of the material produces rotational forces in the material that restore the material. Thus it is rotational forces that generate the restorative forces as tangential components to the rounding.
Imposing a potential energy initial condition in a tensile medium results in the restoration of the medium through rotational oscillations. Applying the potential as an impulse results in a rolling wave transport in the tensile medium. The rolling wave carries the potential impulse and the restorative ftces in a time dependent way. It is how quickly and how strongly the restorative forces act that determines the speed of the wave. Interestingly this speed is determined by mc
2 = T the restorative force! However m here is an inertial mass constant , but a mass related factor even if dimensionally different,
This rolling wave is time dependent, but the front of the wave is carrying the potential element which is generating the restorative force that acts at the rear. The rotation is thus a swivel backwards and forwards.. The amplitude or spatial motion of the tensile medium determines the action of the rotating swivel . It will lift the medium against gravity on the leading edge and assist the material with gravity on the trailing edge.
When we now look at reflection we see that the leading edge encounters a different viscosity medium. This absorbs the potential as a rotation and begins to return the tensile medium by its restorative forces.in so doing it counteracts the potential imparting force by its own equilibrium restoring forces. If these act fast enough it can return the medium to the rest position before the peak potential arrives and then send back a reflected wave that interferes with the on coming potential..
If the medium is not very fast as in the second case the return wave pulse can be returned as the rear restoring force interacts. The 2 forces combine to send back a strong signal without interference or polarisation by phase. If the medium behaves inelastically the wave may just be damped at the end as if it was free.
The important point is that this wave motion requires a rotating or swivelling bend to propsgate. Propagation does not occur without this time dependent rotation in a viscous medium.
http://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_bulk_sound_speedThis time dependent rotation of the material is hidden within the bulk characteristics of a medium.mby that I mean the usual ideas for measures do not admit the rotation that is present , but rather use trig ratios to measure bending strain. This bending strain is dynamic and so really should be thought of as a rotation. In particular to propagate a rolling wave form usually called a transverse wave , the trailing edge must accelerate the tensile restoring
http://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_bulk_sound_speedforce: thus the whip hand effect transmits the pulse as opposed to just raising the tensile medium.
Finally, all these modes of behaviour in media characterise the transmission of a fluid motive we now call energy. What all these behaviours demonstrate is how energy is first transformed into various kinds of force based on rotational forces.
http://www.roymech.co.uk/Related/Fluids/Fluids_Characteristics.html#Compressibility