waves

[nibot]

One of the things I was taught in elementary school that has long bothered me is that "in [ocean] waves, the water isn't moving, it's just the effect that's moving." Watching the surfers outside my window (ha!), I can't help but remember this. Of course the spirit of the statement is correct, but the problem is that water is not a particularly compressable fluid, so conservation of mass says that water has to be moving. eh?

Comments

[yonked.livejournal.com]

I think it's best to say that: in a wave through a rope the rope moves, and in a wave through the water the water moves. However the scale on which the rope-bits and water-bits move is << one wavelength.