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Light is called an 'electromagnetic wave' for historical reasons* in the following sense: It turned out that the effects of visible light and other radiation can be calculated using Maxwell's equations, which are also used to model the behaviour of electrically charged particles. This was an instant of a successful unification and it hasn't been dismissed since.
Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by the eye. It travels as a transverse wave. Unlike a sound waves, light waves do not need a medium to pass through, they can ...
Eventually quantum mechanics came to picture light as (in some sense) both a particle and a wave, and (in another sense) as a phenomenon which is neither a particle nor a wave (which actually are macroscopic phenomena, such as baseballs or ocean waves). Instead, under some approximations light can be described sometimes with mathematics appropriate to one type of macroscopic metaphor ...
Nov 21, 2024 · Rather than absorbing light continuously from a wave, atoms actually receive energy in packets of light called photons, explaining odd observations such as the existence of a cutoff frequency.
May 24, 2024 · Mathematics and experiments show that light is a transverse wave – the electric and magnetic field vectors point in directions that are perpendicular to the direction of motion of the light wave (and as it turns out, they also rare always perpendicular to each other). Figure 2.1.1 – Electromagnetic Wave
Nov 14, 2024 · Light - Electromagnetic, Wavelength, Spectrum: In spite of theoretical and experimental advances in the first half of the 19th century that established the wave properties of light, the nature of light was not yet revealed—the identity of the wave oscillations remained a mystery. This situation dramatically changed in the 1860s when the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, in a watershed ...
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Why is light called an 'electromagnetic wave'?
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Is light a wave or a particle? How is it created? And why can’t humans see the whole spectrum of light? All your questions answered.
