Hi all: Why is it that we have a dozen or so different electromagnetic wave types and yet every one of them can be used for analog and digital communication?
Thanks!
In: Physics
In some ways, all the electromagnetic waves are similar, and those properties are what we use for communications.
But different frequencies of EM interact with matter and our senses in very different ways, and it wasn’t always obvious that they were aspects of the same thing. Light we see with our eyes, radio we make and detect with electronics, x-rays show up in unexpected places and expose film. So we have different types of EM because they’re very different for most practical purposes, but all capable of carrying information.
Analogy: there are a lot of types of matter, but all of them can be used as a weight.
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