OPINION: This is a love song: the physics of music and the music of physics
If you get the right frequency, you can definitely break a wine glass with sound waves, explains John Rayner in this love story. Image: blackred/iStockphoto My wife Theresa represents many things for me – in addition to being my partner, I see her as a 17cm-long quarter-wavelength resonator (which I hope you’ll understand and agree with by the end of this article). Romance, as you’ll have noted by this stage, is most definitely not dead. Theresa is also a noted operatic soprano. In the one person she combines the artistry, feeling and lyrical tones of her craft with some beautiful physics. For me, physics has an aesthetic beauty of its own, expressed through a small number of universal principles that sweep across a range of apparently unconnected applications. From Theresa, let’s take the principle of resonance which is where we can make large vibrations if we push something at a rate that is...