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- 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).
17 hours ago · According to Sapienza, this isn't the right question to be asking. "Light is not sometimes a particle and sometimes a wave," he said. "It is always both a wave and a particle. It's just that we ...
May 24, 2024 · When we look at a single point light source, the farther away it is, the flatter the light wavefronts will be when they reach us. When the source is very far away (e.g. the sun), then the wavefronts are essentially flat.
- Waves of Light
- Colours of Light
- To Summarise
These different colours of light have different wavelengths and frequencies. Red light has the longest wavelength, and the lowest frequency of the visible spectrum. Violet has the shortest wavelength, and the highest frequency of the visible spectrum.
Mixing coloured materials, such as paint, is an example of subtractive colour mixing. Red paint appears red to us because when white light strikes it, the red pigments reflect the red wavelengths of light and absorball of the wavelengths. This reflected light is what is seen by our eyes. The same is true for all of the other colours. So what about ...
Light travels very fast - at the speed of light in fact!Light travels as waves.Light travels in straight lines.Light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation move through a vacuum with a constant speed, c, of 2.998 × 10 8 m s −1. This radiation shows wavelike behavior, which can be characterized by a frequency, ν, and a wavelength, λ, such that c = λν. Light is an example of a travelling wave.
If light is a particle, then why does it refract when travelling from one medium to another? And if light is a wave, then why does it dislodge electrons ? But all behavior of light can be explained by combining the two models: light behaves like particles and light behaves like waves.
Light is a form of energy produced by a light source. Light is made of photons that travel very fast. Photons of light behave like both waves and particles. Light sources. Something that produces light is called a light source. There are two main kinds of light sources:
Nearly every light source is polychromatic. White light is polychromatic. A graph of relative intensity vs. frequency is called a spectrum (plural: spectra). Although frequently associated with light, the term can be applied to any wave phenomena. A continuous spectrum is one in which every frequency is present within some range.
