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!
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A simplified experiment to get an initial idea about waves.
Have someone hold one end of a rope and you hold the other and stretch it taut between you both. Get the other person to move their end of the rope up and down fairly quickly (like a “wave”). Done properly, you should feel your end of the rope trying to move up and down as well. If the rope is long enough you might even see a “wave” moving from one end to the other as a disturbance.
Essentially what is travelling is that wave as the rope just stays between the both of you. This is how radio waves work but the rope is replaced by an electromagnetic field and the disturbance will be seen as changes in that field. That disturbance is caused by changing currents/voltages in an antenna which propagates the disturbance to the field.
If you go deeper into physics, it gets a bit more complicated but for the purposes of things like radio, wi-fi etc, this model is generally what is used to describe and design things to work.
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