what are light waves?

Answer 1

Photons are particles that have a strange wave like behavior. There are NO light waves. The behavior is all wrong.

Light is composed of distinct particles smaller than electrons and like electrons and other kinds of matter they can be affected by gravity. Light can be bent by gravity and gravitational lensing has been used to discover more about the universe since it can determine the mass of an object by the angle that it bends the light at.

Sound is a wave, just like motion in a pool of water. When you throw a rock in the waves spread out. If you throw two rocks in then the two waves can hit and cancel each other out. This happens because the wave is a collection of moving water particles that collide and cancel each other out. The Bose noise reduction headphones uses an idea from Arthur C. Clarke to reduce noise by creating an equal noise that is exactly out of phase with the noise and so cancels the noise out. It can do this because the air molecules, conducting the sound, are like the water molecules in the water waves that meet and interfere with each other. The problem is that light can do this as well.

There is a famous physics experiment where a single beam of light is split and recombined. It should be the same beam of light as before, but recombining the light creates an interference pattern as if the light was a wave. However, light particles are photons and a beam of light is a stream of photons not a wave. A wave needs something to conduct it. A sound wave travels underwater, underground and in the air because the water, the earth, or the air molecules continue to carry the vibration caused by the wave.

Space is empty there is no medium to conduct the vibrations. If you scream in space there will be no noise. However, light acts like it is a wave and that means it needs a medium to conduct it. In the 1800s this medium was called “the aether or ether.” It was theorized that just as our atmosphere is full of air molecules space was full of ether. This is wrong, there is no aether of space, and there is no ether of space; space is a vacuum. (Don’t be confused by ether, the first anesthesia, a gas. This gas was discovered around the same time as the aether theory was proposed).

Why light interferes with itself is unknown except it might be related to the fact that a stream of light, which we can see, is actually a collection of photons all traveling in the same direction. A beam of light is not a line of photons, but a whole bunch of lines of photons traveling together. So when we see light interfering with itself it is because we can’t get a single stream of photons. We don’t have a light source that thin, not even the thinnest laser.

If light was a wave then it couldn’t travel across a vacuum and it wouldn’t bend like a stream of particles, but like a ripple on a pond. Light is a particle called a photon; and for some reason they can interfere with each other and it once made people think that it was a wave. Calling light a wave is a historical reference dating from the times of Sherlock Holmes and it is in error. Light is a stream of photons which are particles just like radioactive particles. In fact light is radiation.

When the photons move they have a frequency and time that it takes for that frequency to recycle (a period or wavelength). As the frequency changes with the photon the type of radiation changes; from microwaves to ultraviolet rays all of these types of radiation are photons. They all travel at the speed of light, but they vibrate with a different frequency. The difference between the colors that you and I see is the difference between their frequencies. If you had eyes that were three feet wide then you might be able to detect radar waves, you would need eyes that large to capture the entire frequency of the photons.

Answer 2

Light is not a wave. It a micromass particle which moves in sequence in a flux of rays at different frequencies but at the same continuous velocity.
The Formula for the distance between particles of light in one single ray is as follows;
Lenght of the separation distance between light masses =L
Velcity of light during one distance =C
Frequency between the motion of the light particle =Fq

L = C / Fq

Notice the moving masses of light follows the same formula as the formula of a wave and can be analysed in terms of the Energy in a wave.Neverthe less light is not masseless as is erroneously believed. Because its a very small mass does not mean its massless,Its a micromass whose mass limit has been recently be verified by experiment which very closely matches calculations.

Light has ONE Unique nature . It doe not have a split personality ; it behaves as a micromass particles and follows the rules of Gravity just as any other mass structure. It certainly is not a wave. Einstein proved that light was a mass particle.
Newton also postulated that Light was a Corpuscular Mass Entity.
Two Scientists like that cannot be both wrong.

The proof lies in the Michelson -Morley experiment because he was expecting light to be a wave needing a special medium existing just for the light wave during propagation ;his expectation proved wrong. The reason he was wrong is because light is Not a wave.

Einstein discovered that light did bend in the Vicinity and presence of a large Gravitational mass as the Sun.The reason is that light is not a massless particle, its a micromass that responds to a Gravity Field.

Answer 3

LIght waves have a dual personality. On the one hand, they are photons, emitted when an electron changes state in an atom. But they also have wave properties, so can be diffracted and focused. The wave properties are described by a set of formulas developed by James Clerk Maxwell (see Maxwell's Equations); the particle properties are described by quantum mechanics, as developed by Planck, Einstein, and others. Polarized light is an effect of the wave properties.

Answer 4

Light is a wave emission of energy at a frequency that our eye can detect. Within the spectrum of light are different colors, corresponding to different frequencies of light waves.

Answer 5

light waves are electromagnetic waves. "light waves" are we we can see in the visible light spectrum with colors. Infrared and ultraviolet are also electromagnetic waves, but our eyes cannot see them.

Answer 6

ripples in the fabric of space.
or
its what happen when an electric field collapses into a magnetic field, and then the magnetic field collapses into an electric field and that just keeps happening.

Answer 7

light waves are light particles!


photons, quantas, all of that.

Answer 8

photons, pieces of energy given off by accelerating charges