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Aug 12, 2012 · And so, that suggests there is no medium through which light travels. Dominic - This has to do with two theories of physics called quantum mechanics and special relativity. And the question that was troubling physicists about 100 years ago was whether light is a particle or a wave. The problem is, you can describe some properties of light as ...
Mar 27, 2012 · If nothing oscillates there are no waves, neither in water nor in the electromagnetic field. The medium disappears only when one thinks of an electromagnetic field as being nothing, only a vacuum. But this liberal view of the vacuum is quite different from the view of the vacuum in QED, the accepted theory of electromagnetic fields.
Jun 8, 2022 · When someone says light has no medium, they mean there is no physical substance composed of atoms that needs to oscillate. We still need a background medium. If there were no background EM fields, there would be no light (a rather trite and unphysical statement for any physicists reading this). Hope that clears things up
Apr 24, 2017 · The question of how light travels through space is one of the perennial mysteries of physics. In modern explanations, it is a wave phenomenon that doesn't need a medium through which to propagate. According to quantum theory, it also behaves as a collection of particles under certain circumstances. For most macroscopic purposes, though, its behavior can be described by treating it as a wave ...
Jun 10, 2016 · Answer by Brian Bi, who majored in physics, on Quora: We know that light doesn't need a medium through which to travel because the speed of light is experimentally constant: independent of the ...
The fields vibrate at right angles to the direction of movement of the wave, and at right angles to each other. Because light has both electric and magnetic fields, it's also referred to as electromagnetic radiation. Electromagnetic radiation doesn't need a medium to travel through, and, when it's traveling in a vacuum, moves at 186,000 miles ...
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May 2, 2014 · Light may seem to be an exception, leading many to say that light is a wave that can travel through a vacuum with no medium. Light doesn't use EM fields as its medium; light IS an EM (electromagnetic) wave. Maxwell's equations tell us that a magnetic field changing in time causes an electric field to change in space, and an electric field ...
