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
Waves are just mathematical constructs that help us “visualize” or “interpret” natural phenomena.
Take sound for instance. When it moves through the air, it doesn’t literally look like a wave that we graph with sines and cosines. What happens instead is a column of air molecules that is disturbed and starts moving sideways, collides with another column of air and pushes it forward due to built up pressure. But mathematically, we can represent this propagation with waves, because there is a frequency and amplitude.
Same goes with light. But what’s interest with light is that we can model it as a wave AND particles. Both of these models serve their purpose and help us understand how light behaves. They are just mathematical models.
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