I know this seems like something that is easily googlable and that this is a dumb question but I couldn’t find anything that explained it well enough for me to understand. I saw that photons are just comprised of waves but what are these waves made of? Are they physical? How can we see waves in the form of light if they are very small?
In: Physics
In a physical medium (like air or water), a wave is a certain “energy pattern” that is expressed in a physical way, like the waves on the ocean’s surface or the back and forth movement of air molecules (sound waves). You can see what these look like – a rhythmic up and down or side to side or back and forth movement of something physical. With light/electromagnetic energy (irreducible packets of which are called photons), wave-like behavior is experienced but there’s nothing the waves of electromagnetic energy are moving in – they are just waves (or rather, they act like waves). We can’t see the waves, we can only see how light and other forms of electromagnetism behave, and that behavior can only be explained by waves. The really odd part is that light seems to behave as BOTH a wave and as a particle, depending on what you’re measuring. And it’s not that a large collection of light particles move in a wave-like way, it’s that each irreducible unit of light (a photon) is both a wave AND a particle. There’s no way to picture this or understand it intuitively, but theory and experiment after experiment establish that it must be so.
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