(physics) a regular variation in value about a mean

Usage examples of oscillation.

In this lame cage they were lowered into the excavation, a journey that took them through storage and maintenance areas, restricted sectors, down along porous shale and rock, past timber underpinnings and assemblies of masonry and steel that formed support for subtunnels and emergency access routes, the elevator suddenly dropping into open air, free of its shaft, cabling into the darkness of the inverted cycloid, air currents, oscillation, a bucketing descent through drainage showers and rubble-fall, the cage shaking so badly that Billy sought to convince himself there was a pattern to the vibrations and changes of speed, a hidden consistency, all gaps fillable, the organized drift of serial things passing to continuum.

This is the horary oscillations of the atmospheric pressure which, in some countries are so regular that the time of day may be ascertained by the height of the barometer.

Ships in nearing these islands and making the observations already pointed out, will greatly assist in determining the increase of oscillation proceeding westward from the nodal point of the two great European systems.

In those fleeting but recurrent moments of alien lightning he saw himself living, felt and saw inside his brain, and observed there the quickened oscillations of an inexpressibly complicated, delicate, and precious apparatus vibrating with multiple tasks, like a highly sensitive watchworks shielded behind glass because a grain of dust suffices to disturb it.

Now, just toward the 20th of February, the oscillations of the barometrical column began to preoccupy the young novice, who noted them several times a day with much care.

The wind kept in the condition of a stiff breeze all the time, and certain oscillations of the barometrical column indicated that it tended to freshen.

These oscillations were exactly like those described under Brassica and Dionaea, but they occurred only occasionally.

In some cases, as with the hypocotyls of Brassica, the leaves of Dionaea and the joints of the Gramineae, the circumnutating movement when viewed under the microscope is seen to consist of innumerable small oscillations.

When we interpret the arrangement of numbers found there on a nominalistic basis, as is done when the axis- and angle-relationships of crystals are reduced to a mere propinquity of the atoms distributed like a grid in space, or when the difference in angle of the position of the various colours in the spectrum is reduced to mere differences in frequency of the electromagnetic oscillations in a hypothetical ether - then we bar the way to the comprehension not only of number itself, as a quality among qualities, but also of all other qualities in nature.

Worse, he thought shiftable hodiechrons and temporal oscillation were entirely plausible, and when she told him she thought Max was having some kind of midlife crisis, Dr.

This upward movement differs from one of the great diurnal oscillations above described only by the position being permanent during the night and by its periodicity, as it always commences late in the evening.

He was listening to the subaudible rustlings, flutings and oscillations of the alien language and learning it rapidly.

La Place, and from the non-coincidence of these planes with the central plane of the vortex, must produce the same oscillation in the axis of the solar vortex, as the moon does in the terral vortex, but to what amount, observation can alone determine.

The leaflets of Averrhoa made a countless number of little oscillations when the temperature was high and the sun shining.

On a strip chart, it looks like a prominent oscillation of roughly 10 cycles a second.