The waves that ducks (or ships, or anything else moving through water) make are called “wakes”. And wake watching is so much fun! A wake is pretty much the Mach cone in 2D — waves from the duck can’t propagate faster than the leading edge of the wake. When a wake passes by, that’s the […]
I’m in Manchester for Science in Public 2019 and I couldn’t help myself, I had to do some wave watching. To be fair, though: These pictures really don’t do Manchester justice as a city. It is such an amazing city! Last time I was here, I spent a whole day exploring four historical libraries that were […]
I just love this picture: The two boats in the front are going at the same speed (the trainer is driving right next to the person in the row boat over a long distance), yet look at how different the two ships’ wakes look! The motor boat has this huge, breaking, turbulent wake. Even though […]
After talking a lot about turbulent wakes this week, here are two pictures of different kinds of wakes. They are of course turbulent, too, but on a very different scale. In the picture above, see how you see pairs of eddies on either side of the row boat’s wake? That’s where the oars were in […]
