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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An easy way to think about it is that it’s light on a spectrum you can’t see with your eyes.
Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, the same as light and radiative heat. What you’ve stumbled on is how the theory of relativity and ultimately quantum mechanics came to be. It’s all very complicated but the simplest way to explain it is that although electromagnetic radiation is transmitted by particles (photons, specifically), particles also have wave-like properties as demonstrated by the double slit experiment.
Whilst sound is a shockwave, which behaves as you describe, electromagnetic radiation doesn’t need a medium to travel through like air because it is carried in photons. They once thought that there was such a medium (called the luminiferous aether) because of how light appears to be a wave, but this was “disproven” and ultimately long story short this led to the idea of wave-particle duality, in which particles also have the properties of waves.
Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, the same as light and radiative heat. What you’ve stumbled on is how the theory of relativity and ultimately quantum mechanics came to be. It’s all very complicated but the simplest way to explain it is that although electromagnetic radiation is transmitted by particles (photons, specifically), particles also have wave-like properties as demonstrated by the double slit experiment.
Whilst sound is a shockwave, which behaves as you describe, electromagnetic radiation doesn’t need a medium to travel through like air because it is carried in photons. They once thought that there was such a medium (called the luminiferous aether) because of how light appears to be a wave, but this was “disproven” and ultimately long story short this led to the idea of wave-particle duality, in which particles also have the properties of waves.
Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, the same as light and radiative heat. What you’ve stumbled on is how the theory of relativity and ultimately quantum mechanics came to be. It’s all very complicated but the simplest way to explain it is that although electromagnetic radiation is transmitted by particles (photons, specifically), particles also have wave-like properties as demonstrated by the double slit experiment.
Whilst sound is a shockwave, which behaves as you describe, electromagnetic radiation doesn’t need a medium to travel through like air because it is carried in photons. They once thought that there was such a medium (called the luminiferous aether) because of how light appears to be a wave, but this was “disproven” and ultimately long story short this led to the idea of wave-particle duality, in which particles also have the properties of waves.
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