Principle of Superposition of Waves

Waves are remarkably unselfish about sharing space: unlike solid objects, two (or more) wave patterns can pass through and overlap in the very same region without displacing or disturbing each other in any permanent way. The principle of superposition of waves describes exactly what happens when they do overlap: when two or more waves travelling through a medium arrive at the SAME point simultaneously, each wave produces its OWN displacement at that point completely independently of what the others are doing there, and the resultant (net, observed) displacement at that point is simply the VECTOR SUM of all the individual displacements each wave would have produced on its own. …