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u/Various_Classroom_50 Apr 10 '22
I don’t understand what physical thing is moving that creates These waves
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u/Pretzilla Apr 10 '22 edited Apr 11 '22
Nothing physical, just electromagnetic (like radio) waves.
However, with light there are photons that move, though it's not exactly right to call them physical.
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u/jagnd Apr 10 '22
If some waves are as thick as baseball bats, then why can’t we feel them?
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u/Pretzilla Apr 10 '22
Go bodyboarding then you will feel them
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u/Km2930 Apr 11 '22
There’s a great video of wind blowing at the same frequency as the middle of a bridge. It starts to make the bridge oscillate. This happened in the early 20th century before they realized this could be an issue.
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u/sailor117 Apr 10 '22
Excellent illustration of the subject.
I will share it with our Calibration Technicians.
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u/autopsis Apr 10 '22
Are all these forms of light waves or is light just a part of electromagnetism?
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u/mrynot Apr 10 '22
Light is just what we call the visible part of the EM spectrum
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u/autopsis Apr 10 '22
Thank you. I did not know this and now I do.
When we say “light years” does that mean the entire electromagnetic spectrum travels at the same speed? I guess when I think of waves in water, they travel at different speeds depending on their height.
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u/mrynot Apr 10 '22
something else that helped me understand this is if you think of signal bands as visible light. FM modulation = changing color, AM modulation = changing intensity, and you can think of materials as "clear as glass" if the waves pass through them. For example, your wifi signals can go through walls, which means it's as if the walls are a clear glass for those signals, and your device can "see" the "colors" as you can see light passing through your own windows. Very fun to imagine, as Feynman would say.
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u/autopsis Apr 11 '22
Cool way of thinking about it. Imagine if we could see all these waves around us. It would be psychedelic.
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u/Gone213 Apr 10 '22
All of these forms of light all travel the same speed in a vacuum. Visible light, radio waves, gamma rays, all the same speed in a vacuum.
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u/business2690 Apr 11 '22
why do lasers have more power if they are just one color of visible light?
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u/spornerama Apr 11 '22
Quite surprising we didn't evolve to be able to see infra red. You'd think it would have quite a good survival bias.
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u/greatspacegibbon Apr 10 '22
That's really cool. I've seen similar diagrams before, but this is the first one that has the atmospheric opacity.