Don’t waves need a medium to travel through? Isn’t space just essentially empty? I know they’re electromagnetic waves, but what does that mean essentially?
Edit: Thanks for the response guys. From your response I’ve realised there’s no way to explain to a 5 year old how light works!
In: Physics
Depending how interested you are in this topic, check out The Great Courses: relativity and the quantum revolution. It’s a great intro to physics for non-physicists
It can be whichever one you want depending on the experiment you do when you ask the question and try and find out which one it is.
So it’s both, but it’s neither.
light is both a wave and a particle. think of a wave packet, a wave that is suppressed by a bell curve. in this picture, light is an excitation of the photon field, often written as A. the photon field expands throughout all of space and time. since the photon field is connected to electric and magnetic fields, the speed of light is connected to their vacuum permeability ε and µ.
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