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
It’s electric and magnetic fields vibrating together in unison. If you simply jerk an electron (which is a particle with a negative electric charge) back and forth periodically it will create a changing electric field which will induce a changing magnetic field which will induce a changing electric field and so on. You have an electromagnetic wave. This happens in an AC generator, for example, although the resulting wave is very low-frequency (50 or 60 waves per second usually).
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