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
ELI5: When people say photons or electrons are wavelike they literally mean “like a wave”. Notice the language, no one says it IS a wave, but it’s LIKE a wave. Ultimately you can only observe the end result of the photons, and the way we explain that end result is to say “wow, if this was a wave, it would make a lot of sense”. You can even treat it as if it were a wave, and a lot of really interesting math *works*. So your next question, if it looks like a wave and it talks like a wave, then it’s a wave? Not quite, because there is also results from observation where it looks like a particle. So you have the situation where something acts these certain ways, but we are unable to firmly put it into one category or the other. Don’t try to find an analogy or something that explains how a photon works compared to waves in a pond, because it doesn’t exist. It’s an entirely separate thing. The only way you can describe the behavior of a photon is to say it behaves like a photon!
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