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 can kinda interact, but only where they overlap. For example, take a slinky and hold one end. Then have a friend take the other and move back until it’s fairly stretched out. Then both of shake it a few times randomly. You’ll see waves travel down the slinky towards one another. Eventually they’ll cross in the middle and interfere temporarily. The highs of your wave will cancel out the lows of his and vice versa, and where the highs overlap they’ll add together. It’ll only happen briefly when they’re on top of one another and then your waves will just keep moving on towards your friend like nothing happened, and his will keep moving towards you.
It’s the same with EM waves. Where they bump into each other they can add together or muffle each other, but then they’ll move on again like nothing happened.
Now, since they’re everywhere sometimes we do measure them where they overlap with other stuff. Usually though this isn’t an issue. For one we can separate different types of waves depending on what they need. Your wifi and TV remote are both EM waves, but they’re very different frequencies. So your computer only looks for WiFi’s frequencies, and your TV only looks for infrared. It doesn’t matter that they overlap since it’s easy to separate only what you want.
And when they do share similar frequencies, usually they’ll pick up all of the waves but only look for specific patterns that mean something to only your device. There might be other patterns coming in, but it’ll just ignore those until it seems one it needs.
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