I really can’t grasp the concept of waves. I can imagine it a bit for sound waves: a speaker has a surface that pushes air, and the moving air eventually pushes the membrane in our ears.
But I’m confused about wifi etc. What exactly is the thing that physically travels? Is it air or something else? Does it physically move in a wavy pattern?
Edit: thanks for all the answers! But damn I’m overwhelmed. It’s gonna take me days to read and fully understand the answers. But thanks!
In: 87
A wave is a periodic disturbance in… something.
I’ll take three cases, getting less intuitive as we go.
In **water waves**, the disturbance (in… water) is at right-angles to the wave’s direction of travel.
In **sound waves**, the disturbance is a pressure wave – periodic compression in the packing of the constituent particles of some medium (air, water, solids) where the disturbance is in the same direction as the wave’s direction of travel. (The usual analogy is to a Slinky being pushed to get a compression in the coils travelling along the toy’s length.)
WiFi signals travel in radio waves. These are an example of **electromagnetic waves**. In these waves (which also include light, microwaves etc.) things get less intuitive, because we’re no longer talking about a disturbance in a physical medium; we’re now talking about a disturbance in paired electric and magnetic fields. These fields in a sense feed off each other and keep themselves going in a straight line; they don’t need any medium in which to travel.
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