I’ve seen one multiple educational videos that draw light as two orthogonal waves traversing through space. What is that trying to represent?What exactly is going up and down?
Furthermore, why do people often make the analogy that light acts like a ripple in a pond?
In: Physics
The two orthogonal waves are one electric wave and one magnetic wave. What’s going up and down is basically the electric and magnetic force. So an electric force can be positive or negative (same with magnetic). So as the wave travels through space, the electric and magnetic forces change magnitude and direction and when you plot that out you get these wave patterns.
The pond analogy is because all waves act in similar ways. If you drop a stone in a pond, you’ll see waves shoot out from the point where you dropped the stone where the water can be at the crest or the trough of the wave. If you create light and fire it out from a single point, the electric and magnetic forces would create this wave pattern in the same way.
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