Talk:Impedance

Wave impedance & intrinsic impedance

Wave impedance and intrinsic impedance link to the same article. Does they both need to listed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.104.230.120 (talk) 16:12, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Opposition to transmission

Electrical impedances can be described as an opposition to the passage of current. However, you cannot say that impedances of vacuum or of a medium are an opposition to the transmission of waves. Waves are very well transmitted in high impedance media. Just the speed of waves and the ratios of some physical quantities are different (electric/magnetic fields, pressure/displacement, etc.). -- LPFR 08:48, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Impedance important for every transmission of energy, for life

Impedance, when understood from the word’s latin meaning of hindrance, may be interpreted in many different ways, not to mention all mathematical formulas, as perfectly done in the Wikipedia. I’d like a "positive", a general explanation too: Transmission and or acceptance of energy is possible only, if impedance matches. The fact of reflection ("non-acceptance") matters less than the consequences in the (more or less) accepting medium, be it a loudspeaker, the inner ear, humans not being harmed by small doses of microvave radiation (e.g. mobile phones or WiFi), all the way to myself unfortunately not having "receptors" for the Chinese language: so to say "no match of language skill impedance". That’s stressing the argument, but you might consider to elaborate on the general (just physical?) importance of impedance matching media properties for life (or not matching, in the case of non-harmful microwaves), with filters, membranes, cosmic atomic particles zipping through the globe without effect or the air burning real pieces of space garbage, friction etc. All energy is good for nothing, if it’s not accepted, like boxing into foam, ein Schlag ins Wasser. From cosmic to atomic, impedance matters. Or am I stressing the argument? Thank you. — Fritz Jörn (talk) 08:23, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

@Fritz Jörn: This page is a disambiguation page, it should only contain entries for meanings on which we actually have an article. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, that is what Wiktionary is for. Impedance is an invented word and does not have any meanings outside of physics and engineering as you seem to think it does. Your understanding of impedance matching is faulty by the way. Mismatched impedances will result in some transmitted energy as well as some reflected energy. It is not all or nothing. SpinningSpark 10:09, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

You are right, Spinningspark. Technically I realize that non-matching impedence will reflect more or less energy, but except for acoustics, reflected energy might not be as important as accepted energy. In many cases, when you ask yourself: Does A influence B? You’ll ask yourself: 1. How much energy is available and 2. (How good) does impedance match? There are more commonalities in "impedence" than a pure disambiguation may reveal. But ok, that’s you structure. (What do you mean by "invented word"? Aren’t all words invented?)

 The French Wikipedia works like yours, starts with a disambiguation, the Italian gives both, first you get general thoughts, but there’s a disambiguation as well, the German Wikipedia starts right off with an article, mainly on el. impedence. Seeing the wealth of information I now tend to your way of splitting it. – Fritz Jörn (talk) 14:03, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

References

You might be interested in an article I wrote recently, mechanical-electrical analogies, which discusses the connection between electrical, mechanical and acoustic impedance and other analogous quantities. The article also mentions impendance in the wider context of energy domains generally, but there is perhaps still room for an even more general article. There is also impedance analogy, a specific version of one of these analogies which explicitly starts from an impedance connection.

No, not all words are invented, mostly they develop naturally, or at least no one can pin them down to a specific creation. In this case, however, we know exactly who coined it and when. Technical words for new concepts are often invented, but this is not the case for language generally. SpinningSpark 14:51, 15 November 2014 (UTC)

Very, very interesting what you write, Spinningspark. I followed trough to analog computers, and remembered a “lab” in the 60s where we students had to program an oscillation into an (electrical) analog computer. We asked ourselves at that time, if analog or digital computers would have more of a future … Today the analogy of energies (electrical, mechanical, chemical … ) is most surprising to me. I calculated the mechanical power in a mobile phone battery, say 4 Ah with 3.7 V = 14.8 VAh = 14.8 Wh = 53,280 Ws = 53,280 J. Then I mentally carried 10 cement sacks of 50 kg (half a ton in total) up 4 stories (10 m) and got 10 × 50 (kg) × 10 (m) × 10 J = 50,000 J, if I didn’t blunder. More than the charged battery. No wonder they do mischief when exploding. – Fritz Jörn (talk) 18:50, 29 November 2016 (UTC)