ABSTRACT
Hooke and Newton were great English scientists of the seventeenth century, and there was ill-concealed tension between them. It is thus somewhat ironic that the basic equation for the simple oscillator and the wave equation are both obtained by a happy combination of Hooke’s law and Newton’s equation of motion. Complex exponential notation is ideally suited for the representation of harmonic vibrations. In the real world, there are always frictional and resistive effects that eventually damp out an oscillator’s movement unless it is maintained by an external force. Waves are universal, presenting themselves in different guises in nature, and they are ubiquitous in the physics and engineering laboratory. In optics, dispersion manifests itself in the splitting of white light into its spectral components by a prism or a raindrop.
