I cannot for the life of me properly understand waves and energy in physics, no matter how many definitions and explanations I come across.
I can do calculations with all of these things, but I have trouble understanding what they represent in reality. Can I touch a wave? Is a wave a physical thing like an object, that moves up and down? Ditto for energy.
The definitions of these things are kinda unhelpful. Defining wave as “thing that transfers energy” doesn’t tell me what that *thing* is, for example; it just tells me something about the thing.
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All objects that you can touch are made of energy if you look deep enough. They’re all made of atoms and atoms are mostly “empty” space. So just because you cant touch something, it doesn’t mean its not a real thing. It’s not like you’re caressing the quarks when you’re touching a table.
Physical touch is a poor way of interacting with things that arent large, macro scale objects. This sense unfortunately doesn’t help us that much in understanding physics.
So energy and waves are real things but you can’t pet them and theres no explanation where the sense of touch helps here. You must try to think beyond our limited human senses, which serve us well in navigating the world around us but sadly not in really understanding quantum physics. It just wasn’t evolutionarily advantageous for our species to develop a quantum physics sensing sense, unfortunately.
So instead of wondering whether these things are real things, consider that our senses offer us very limited interactivity with the physical world.
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