I was watching this Feynman’s talk where he said to the reporter that “I can see you because you’re in front of me, and person on my left can see person straight to him, on my right”,because light waves are always reflecting and bouncing off, it’s our perception.
That got me to question this about light and then all electromagnetic waves in general.
Apologies if this is a stupid question, just curious.
In: Physics
They do interact, but they don’t get “mixed up”. This can be seen through things like diffraction (e.g. Young’s double-slit experiment), where the interaction between waves causes constructive and destructive interference, and that’s where you get your fringes from. This characteristic of light and all other EM waves is used in a whole bunch of things – from the way we use lasers to read certain media, to measuring distance or even the warping of space (e.g. LIGO). Indeed, the idea of constructive and destructive interference is what enables things like waveguides and cavities to work!
Why don’t they get mixed up? Well, because one photon doesn’t have an effect on another photon. They can add together (the magnetic and electric field can combine for an instant and interfere), but the total sum of the fields is still recognisable as two separate photons – their individual fields don’t change the direction of each other, and there’s no attractive or repulsive forces that cause any sort of collision.
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