Posted by wunhuanglo [ 67.35.251.217 ] on August 07, 2004 at 07:30:54:

In Reply to: Re: Huygen's Principle... posted by Bill Fitzmaurice on August 06, 2004 at 19:06:40:

seems kind of an extreme statement. Understanding does improve steadily though, even with something as old as wave interaction. It's only recently that the rouge wave phenomena was modeled sucesfully, but that didn't require any "new" physics.

It seems to me two thing are fair to say:

1. Huygens model describes the behavior of a plane wave, essentially of a single frequency since the diffraction and reflection effects will vary with the relative magnitudes of wavelength and obstruction. While useful as far as it goes, it's hardly "complete" in the real-world sense. Idealized plane waves are hard to come by.

2. You can't argue with the empirical result. You don't need a model for wave propagation to explain a meter reading (though it certainly helps to improve the meter reading).

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