So I’ve been trying to comprehend how wifi works, and just cannot visualise it.
I know that there is this field were surrounded by, and antennas create waves in it that can be picked up by other antennas.
I’ve been trying to visualise it similar to being underwater and moving water around with your hands, but not sure if this is accurate.
Anyway, I don’t know what this “field” is made of. Can someone ELI5?
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So an electro magnetic wave is actually two different waves, one electric and one magnetic that travel in perpendicular planes but in the same direction, or at least it can be thought of in this way. The thing that makes it different than day a wave of water is that it’s a transverse wave, meaning it’s peaks and depths are not in the same direction as the direction it’s traveling, think a sine wave moving to the right. Electro magnetic waves are very interesting because they aren’t exactly waves. They have wave like properties but they also have particle like properties. Some will say that light (which is a form of electro magnetic radiation) is both a wave and particle but that is misleading, a more accurate statement is that it is something that we have very little intuition about. Something that we have trouble conceptualizing. Something that has both wave and particle proprieties simultaneously. Another unique feature of electromagnetic radiation is that it does not require a medium, meaning it can travel even if there isn’t any matter, say in a perfect vacuum. When you get in the weeds and learn more it gets stranger, like EM radiation will sometimes disappear and become two particles, one real and one virtual which then combine together due to gravity and become EM radiation again. Other things have shown this particle-wave duality such as electrons. The Field part of EM field is more of a math term, where you can imagine a field as a three dimensional area where at any point you have an associated strength of this EM radiation.
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