Maybe this is a stupid question, but I dont understand what force is driving photons in light beams to go up and down, making a sine wave. How often in which it oscillates determines the frequency yeah, but why does it do that in the first place? And why is it that when light is emitted, instead of scattering like individual particles, the photons stay in a line. Like there’s a force that is keeping them in a straight line, and theres a force causing them to oscillate. Maybe they arent forces, but I just don’t get it.
In: Physics
The photon travels in straight lines and isn’t wiggling around like you see in some animations. That’s just a bad way of showing the wave nature of it.
For imagination purposes don’t think of waves in the ocean that have motion up and down as they travel across the surface. Think of light more like sound waves. Sound waves are oscillations just like ocean waves, but nothing is moving across the direction of travel because the sound wave is just a pressure front. It’s not a perfect analogy since sound travels in something, but light does not. The light is just the electric and magnetic fields alternately collapsing and inducing the creation of the other field which then collapses and induces…etc.
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