- #1
warhammer
- 158
- 31
- TL;DR Summary
- I was reading Halliday-Resnick on Oscillations. It says that 2 curves having same amplitude and period will be shifted differently to each other depending upon the sign of their phase angle.
Continuing on from the summary, the chapter has given a graphed example. We are shown a regular cosine wave with phase angle 0 and another with phase angle (-Pi/4) in order to illustrate that the second curve is shifted rightward to the regular cosine curve because of the negative value. Now, my question is even if we took a positive value of phase angle (supposedly Pi/4) even then the second curve would have been rightward relative to the regular curve or for that matter any other angle as the max value of a cosine function is 1? What am I not understanding or missing here? (Attaching an image of the example for better understanding of the prospective responders).