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- Photons travel in a wave-like fashion, in which the local electric and magnetic field oscillates in intensity, regularly swinging back and forth between high and low energy levels. The energy in the photons determines the type of electromagnetic radiation the photons transmit. This means low-energy photons carry radio waves.
www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsphotons
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 ...
This energy field is called the "electromagnetic field." To put it another way, "light" is the passage of energy from one area of the electromagnetic field to another, and it enhances the connection of electric and magnetic objects, but it is neither electric nor magnetic.
- 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...
May 13, 2023 · Electromagnetic energy is radiant energy that travels in waves at the speed of light. It can also be described as radiant energy, electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, light, or the movement of radiation. Electromagnetic radiation can transfer of heat.
Light is a electromagnetic wave. We talk about the dual-nature of light since in some instances it displays properties of a wave and other times as particles, each in a different state of quanta. When a metal is heated it will emit photons as the electrons shift their energy levels.
Sep 30, 2022 · Most stars emit the bulk of their electromagnetic energy as visible light, that sliver of the spectrum our eyes can see. Hotter stars emit higher energy light, so the color of the star indicates how hot it is. This means that red stars are cool, while blue stars are hot.
Aug 10, 2016 · Electromagnetic energy travels in waves and spans a broad spectrum from very long radio waves to very short gamma rays. The human eye can only detect only a small portion of this spectrum called visible light.
