Talk:Harmonic oscillator

message: In the first equation in the section Damped harmonic oscillator, Fext = ..., I'm wondering if the second '=' (preceeding the "m d2x/dt2" term) isn't suppose to be a '-' instead. RDXelectric (talk) 18:32, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think so. I'm not sure about F=-kx-c \frac{\text{d}x}{\text{d}t} (possibly another form of Hooke's law?), but F=m \frac{\text{d}^2x}{\text{d}t^2} seems to me to just be the calculus form of Newton's second law, F=ma. User44654 (talk) 09:30, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: There is nothing wrong with this equation. I just supplied three reliable citations. If you would like to see the derivation, you can look up the sources.—Anita5192 (talk) 15:34, 25 June 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't mean to jump into the middle of whatever this is, but I did notice on the page that the terms of that equation were showing up in certain browsers without any '-' characters separating them. It appears that characters such as '+' and '-' need to be surrounded by whitespace when they appear between ‹math› tags in order to be rendered on some browsers. I can't make any claims regarding the equation itself. Saltcub (talk) 22:40, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello.  Latex (Wikipedia's math markup language) has its own ideas about how to space things.  Adding spaces within the Latex markup won't change anything, but can make the markup more readable.  Rather than adjust the formulas for "certain browsers" it is better to adjust the browser's zoom setting.  It is a never ending battle.  What looks good in your browser may look bad in my browser.  Some people look at Wikipedia on their phones.  Basically, we stick to doing things a certain standard way and that includes letting latex control the spacing of elements in the formula.   Sometimes, it is judicious to force an extra space by using the \; construct, but it makes the markup a harder to read.  We don't do it for + and - signs. Constant314 (talk) 22:53, 1 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for taking the time to educate me on that. I can see that it's best to let LaTeX do what it wants. I don't think the issue had anything to do with browser zooming, but at any rate it seems to have been resolved now, because the '+' and '-' are now visible, even without the spaces I inserted before checking to see what the preferred style on this page is. Actually, I think I may have been confusing a misconfiguration on my computer with the Latex rendering on "certain browsers," which was a silly mistake and I won't make it again. Because of your explanation, I brushed up on Latex as well as the AMS Style Guide (which is very clear that in every circumstance, the author's preference stands except when allowing it would cause ambiguity or an inconsistency that cannot be fixed in other ways.) I see that the page is well in hand, so I'll duck back out. Again, thank you for taking the time to explain it, I really have learned from the experience. I hope you have an enjoyable December and are safe. Saltcub (talk) 22:30, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: You are not the only person to experience this problem.  Wikipedia's technical wizards are aware of the problem.  The last I heard from them is that they believe this was caused by a change in Chrome and certain other browsers that are based on Chrome. Constant314 (talk) 22:44, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Possible mistake

message: I have a real problem that I hope won't step on too many toes. In fact I welcome the reasoning behind why it was done this way. 
So what I am concerned about is the broad inaccessibility of this explanation of both damped and normal harmonic oscillator explanations. The greet notation of ζ is used to interpret the damping ratio and is not clear an accessible for people to understand. This is not the traditional way to explain damping in physics gamma is used to equate the damping coefficient over 2 times the mass. This is never explained. You use a much more ambiguous method of getting to the interpretations of heavily damped systems that gives little derivation on what and how it relates. There is. I mention of how mass and acceleration are restated and very little use fullness in the inverted explanation of the ratio, that isn't in most university textbooks and is only readily available by shitty OCW scans. I'm flaming here but I respect the effort it takes so I'm willing to discuss why on earth a more linguistically accessible method was not performed in an encyclopedia article  Saml214 (talk) 01:51, 16 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Literal ambiguity through uncommon notation 

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