Transverse oscillations of a continuous system are easy to visualize because you can see directly the function that describes the displacement. The mathematics of longitudinal oscillations of a contin...Transverse oscillations of a continuous system are easy to visualize because you can see directly the function that describes the displacement. The mathematics of longitudinal oscillations of a continuous linear space translation invariant system is the same. It must be, because it is completely determined by the space translation invariance. But the physics is different.
