Eli5: what exactly is the electromagnetic field?
In: Physics
Electricity and magnetism are closely related, and the reason is because that’s how the physics works. There’s not really a better explanation than that.
An electric field will induce a magnetic field, and vice versa. Electric current is affected by a strong enough nearby magnetic field, and a permanent magnet will be affected by a strong enough nearby electric field. That’s why putting a magnet near a CRT display will cause the colors to weird out, because the CRT works by firing electrons, and the movement of electrons is just an electric current.
This is also how electromagnetic waves such as light work. They consist of a changing electric field and a changing magnetic field, and the way they induce eachother is how these waves can basically travel forever in a vacuum if they don’t hit anything.
One way to understand electromagnetic field is to consider it as the influence on electric charge.
We know that an electric charge exerts force on another electric charge, such as opposite charges attract. We then create the concept of electric field to describe this influence.
We also know that a magnet can exert force on electric charge that is moving, like how the earth’s magnet protects us against charges from the sun. We call this influence from the magnet magnetic field.
Further, we also observe that electric field and magnetic field are deeply connected. Like how light is made of the wave of both fields. So, we combine them together into electromagnetic fields.
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