Eli5: Why electromagnetic waves travel in a waveguide against the force of gravity?

211 views

Also, since gravity is also a wave, can we use waveguides to guide gravity waves?

In: 1

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Electromagnetic waves are influenced by gravity. That influence is just very small for most examples, because electromagnetic waves are moving way *way* faster than Earth’s escape velocity.

Gravity *can form* waves. To create a waveguide for these waves would require us to efficiently interact with them. A waveguide works with (some) electromagnetic waves because the electrons in metal are free to move in a way that mimics the wave and even creates copies of it. This doesn’t take too many electrons. Gravity is relatively weak, and gravitational waves are very difficult to interact with at all.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Gravity acts to bend electric and magnetic fields in the same way as space time. However electromagnetic force is so much stronger than gravity. A fridge magnet can lift a fork against the entire gravitational field of the earth. So given a black hole or neuron star, you wouldn’t be able to produce a magnetic strong enough to fight gravity.

With waveguides, they function on the fact that electromagnetic waves can reflect off objects significantly larger than its wavelengths. Gravity in nearly all situations does not act as a wave. And even when gravitational waves are formed by incredibly heavy, fast moving objects (blackholes at significant fractions of the speed of light), gravitational waves cannot be reflected using matter, as it will just move the matter.

This would be like trying to make a audio waveguide out of sound foam, it wouldn’t work