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thumb|The diffraction pattern Airy disk|(Airy disc) of a red [[laser beam projected onto a plate after passing through a small circular aperture in another plate]] Diffraction is the deviation of waves from straight-line propagation due to an obstacle or through an aperture, without any change in their energy. Diffraction is the same physical effect as interference, but interference is typically used for the superposition of a few waves, while the term diffraction is used when many waves are superposed. The term diffraction pattern is used to refer to an image or map of the different direction
Diffraction is what happens when waves bend around obstacles or pass through openings instead of traveling in straight lines, without losing energy in the process. It matters because it affects how waves like light and sound behave in the real world, creating visible patterns that reveal information about both the waves and the objects they encounter.
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).