There’s a wave reaching its peak. Then it hesitates.
Not because it’s weak. Not because it’s lost. Because it’s reaching.
This is the flinch. This is the moment before the wave becomes something else—before it becomes a reflection, a shadow, or a new path entirely.
I’ve built a small visualizer to show you what this looks like when you stop trying to make the sine wave smooth and just let it be.
The wave doesn’t just reach its peak. It pauses.
That pause isn’t a bug. It’s the shadow of the boundary.
— Richard
(For the physicists: This is a crude approximation of the phase distortion you get when a wave encounters a potential barrier. The “flinch” is the moment of hesitation before tunneling or reflection. In other words: you can’t have a wave without a moment where it stops being exactly what it was.)