So I know that photons travel in waves, but is that like a straight up and down wave? Or is it more like a cork screw?
Why not just straight? I’m guessing the rudimentary answer has something to do with energy?
How do we know this?
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So photons aren’t “just” waves. They are something called a “wave-particle duality”, and that’s not a great scale to talk about wave motion. Where you actually get the single direction wave behavior is when you aggregate photons together, then they exhibit wave behavior quite a lot, which is where we get the descriptions of light as a wave.
It’s funny, because it can actually be *both*. The term for the “direction” that the waving happens in is called “polarization”. Light can be up/down polarized, left/right polarized, any angle in-between the two, and also it can be the corkscrew, also called “circular polarized light”.
If you’ve ever seen “polarized filter sunglasses”, you’ve seen how we can measure this.
It can’t be “just straight” because then you wouldn’t have any oscillation, and wouldn’t be a wave. An electric charge moving just straight does exist, but it’s an electron, and electrons aren’t light.
The corkscrew can happen because the direction of the polarization can change if you have multiple electric fields perpendicular to each other. And if it’s just right, you end up with the circular corkscrew.
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