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- Light is a transverse, electromagnetic wave that can be seen by the typical human. The wave nature of light was first illustrated through experiments on diffraction and interference. Like all electromagnetic waves, light can travel through a vacuum. The transverse nature of light can be demonstrated through polarization.
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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 ...
May 24, 2024 · We know that light is a wave based on how it behaves – it exhibits the same properties of other waves we have examined – it interferes with itself, it follows an inverse-square law for intensity (brightness), and so on.
Calculate the Poynting vector and the energy intensity of electromagnetic waves. Explain how the energy of an electromagnetic wave depends on its amplitude, whereas the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. Anyone who has used a microwave oven knows there is energy in electromagnetic waves.
As a wave, light is characterized by a velocity (the speed of light), wavelength, and frequency. As particles, light is a stream of photons. Each has an energy related to the frequency of the wave given by Planck's relation E = hf, where E is the energy of the photon, h is the Planck constant, 6.626 × 10 −34 J·s, and f is the frequency of ...
- Overview
- Light as electromagnetic radiation
- Electric and magnetic fields
- Maxwell’s equations
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 the...
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 the...
The subjects of electricity and magnetism were well developed by the time Maxwell began his synthesizing work. English physician William Gilbert initiated the careful study of magnetic phenomena in the late 16th century. In the late 1700s an understanding of electric phenomena was pioneered by Benjamin Franklin, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, and others. Siméon-Denis Poisson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Carl Friedrich Gauss developed powerful mathematical descriptions of electrostatics and magnetostatics that stand to the present time. The first connection between electric and magnetic effects was discovered by Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted in 1820 when he found that electric currents produce magnetic forces. Soon after, French physicist André-Marie Ampère developed a mathematical formulation (Ampère’s law) relating currents to magnetic effects. In 1831 the great English experimentalist Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, in which a moving magnet (more generally, a changing magnetic flux) induces an electric current in a conducting circuit.
Faraday’s conception of electric and magnetic effects laid the groundwork for Maxwell’s equations. Faraday visualized electric charges as producing fields that extend through space and transmit electric and magnetic forces to other distant charges. The notion of electric and magnetic fields is central to the theory of electromagnetism, and so it requires some explanation. A field is used to represent any physical quantity whose value changes from one point in space to another. For example, the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has a definite value at every point above the surface of Earth; to specify the atmospheric temperature completely thus requires specifying a distribution of numbers—one for each spatial point. The temperature “field” is simply a mathematical accounting of those numbers; it may be expressed as a function of the spatial coordinates. The values of the temperature field can also vary with time; therefore, the field is more generally expressed as a function of spatial coordinates and time: T(x, y, z, t), where T is the temperature field, x, y, and z are the spatial coordinates, and t is the time.
In the early 1860s, Maxwell completed a study of electric and magnetic phenomena. He presented a mathematical formulation in which the values of the electric and magnetic fields at all points in space can be calculated from a knowledge of the sources of the fields. By Faraday’s time, it was known that electric charges are the source of electric fie...
00:00. Did you know? Did you know that scientists and philosophers debated for centuries about whether light traveled in waves or particles? Finally in the 20th century, one of science's "most beautiful experiments" seemed to confirm the wave-like nature of light, until it was further refined some 100 years later. Key concepts.
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Light is a transverse, electromagnetic wave that can be seen by the typical human. The wave nature of light was first illustrated through experiments on diffraction and interference . Like all electromagnetic waves, light can travel through a vacuum.
