My partner and I are casually chatting about how strange the electromagnetic spectrum is, as we sometimes do. The idea came up of creating an antenna that vibrates at the right frequency to produce various colors of light. But then I remembered that “light is both a wave and a particle” … so can someone how photons (right?) relate to the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum?
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An antenna doesn’t vibrate – at least that’s not the mechanism by which it operates. An antenna is ultimately just a conductor through which a current is passed. Every conductor has an electric field around it and pulsing currents through it creates electromagnetic waves. The opposite also holds: electromagnetic waves around a conductor induce an electric current in that conductor. The length of the conductor determines the range of frequencies that the antenna can effectively transmit or receive.
The antenna may vibrate very slightly as a result of of the changing electromagnetic field, but that is just a side effect. Physically vibrating an antenna does not make it emit electromagnetic waves, nor does an antenna receive electromagnetic waves by measuring physical vibrations.
I think you may be conflating light/electromagnetic waves with sound, which *is* mediated by physical vibrations.
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