Non-science guy here. Always been interested but lacked the education

I don't actually physics very much, but from what I understand, light waves are waves in the direction/strength of the electric and magnetic fields. So instead of a wave, where you have a height of the wave, you have an electric/magnetic field change, where you have a vector pointing in some direction, perpendicular to the direction of travel of the wave. You actually get both electric and magnetic field waves, and the direction of these two waves are again perpendicular to each other. Together they can be called an electromagnetic wave.

The reason you can have polarized light is because there are many different directions you can be perpendicular in, in 3D space. A water wave can only move the water up and down, but the electromagnetic field induced by the wave can go in any direction as long as it's perpendicular to the direction of travel. For example, if you have a wave traveling to the right, the "electric" part of the wave could have field vectors going up/down, or maybe towards/away from you - either way it would be perpendicular to "right".

File: atoms.png (88KB, 644x203px) Image search: [Google]

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Energy comes in lots of different forms. When you talk about light as a wave, it comes from the wave theory of light which was dominant up until the very early 20th Century and was formalised by Young's Double Slit experiment which noticed that light makes a diffraction pattern that is very wave like indeed when you fire it through two slits. This changed after Max Planck realised some crazy shit was going in in black body radiation and that the math works better if you introduce the idea of discrete little packets of light quanta, which came to be known as photons.

At that point there was a massive problem, because people had no fucking idea what this thing was, and how exactly light was both a wave and a particle at the same time. The best minds in quantum physics decided on this absurd interpretation whereby they exist as both at the same time, even though such models are basically mutually exclusive. As far as I'm concerned this whole idea of wave-particle duality is completely unsatisfactory but the best we have. The stark and annoying fact about quantum mechanics is that the things which happen there are so weird that our brains are basically insufficient to have any appropriate metaphor which can help us understand. It's similar to loads of things like Pauli's idea of particle "spin". It has nothing to do with spinning like you would expect. These things exist only in mathematical and theoretical descriptions and basically any conceptualisation is unfortunately always going to be incomplete. Pic related is a good quote of this whole shebang. Maybe others will disagree with me.

>>7962267

Interesting, thank you.

I would have thought though, since 1929, there would have been new work which would have shed light on our understanding ( and yes, even conceptualization ) of sub atomic matter and the physical nature of energy.

Has our grasp on understanding the physical nature of reality really been stagnated for so long? I thought the lack of modern insight available to me may have been due purely to the inadequacies of public education and the nonavailability of middle ground scientific material for the general population.

What about these super intelligent individuals we hear about, people with extraordinary intellects. I wonder if they can conceptualize it and if there is any way they can impart their understanding unto lower intelligence such as mine.

>>7962343
>>7962267

>>7962267
>>7962343

No, it has not stagnated. The issue with wave-particle duality has been resolved by modern quantum-theory, and subsequently by the development of the standard model.

Basically there is just the wave-function -- an object which perfectly describes the nature of matter. The wave-function is the sum of all the possible states that matter can have. When you observe a property of that matter, you 'collapse the wave-function', observing it in one-state eliminating all other possibilities. The wave-nature of matter exists in the un-collapsed wavefunciton; the particle-nature exists when you make an observation.

>>7962343

It's because all the best minds are wasting their time on meme shit like string theory in an attempt to get research funding. Plus the only way we can really get access to new knowledge now is by building shit like the LHC which is enormously non-trivial. also, if anything the more we have uncovered, the even less clear it becomes. People get taught the Bohr model of the atom, which is utterly incomplete, and expected to conceptualise the electron not as orbiting the nucleus, but existing in a cloud of probabilistic potential as a wave function, that is also a particle and a wave, oh yeah and by the way, that nucleus isn't even protons and neutrons, they're actually specific combinations of quarks which are regulated by gluons. how are we supposed to visualise that? you can't imagine it as something visible because we're at the level of being smaller than light, so the whole concept of being able to "see" at this scale slips away. nature is basically fucking with us by making this shit so absurd and it's anyone's guess.

Energy and momentum are the currencies of physical processes. All of physics eventually boils down to scattering (or decay), and the currency of energy and momentum must be partitioned or exchanged correctly when an event occurs.

There is no answer to the question "what is energy?" The closest we can get is to say it is something which is conserved, and to parametrize all physical laws in terms of this currency (which came about from observation of natural events).

Now of course there are well-understood theorems that tell us things about energy: Noether's theorem tells us that the symmetry of physical laws (lagrangians, or equations of motion) under time translations (now --> later) demands that energy must be conserved. This doesn't illuminate what energy is.

As for your problem with waves, it goes like this:

Energy comes in many forms, most often in the form of the motion of matter. When this motion changes, matter is often changing the energy of it's motion, requiring it to either take energy from surrounding fields or to deposit that energy within surrounding fields. The matter we are aware of usually accomplishes this though electromagnetic radiation. A charged particle loses energy of motion by giving that energy to the electromagnetic field (really the photon field, if we're being accurate), which in turn carries the energy elsewhere until it is absorbed by other matter. It does this because the electromagnetic (photon)field has no mass, so the energy must move (away) at the speed of light. This mathematical fact that mass = 0 is also the reason why sinusoidal waves (like from trigonometry) are generally depicted. Those are simple solutions to the equations of motion of the photon field.


It makes sense when everything is fields. A massive field is one which has energy when you take it's momentum away. Hence mass is energy.

The thing that "moves through space" is an excited region of the photon field, which has energy.

File: 1456468332748.gif (307KB, 420x420px) Image search: [Google]

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Surely there is some relationship between what we see here in this gif and a wave form of energy.

Is energy a "ball of something" that somehow interacts with our dimensions?

>>7962397
Did you read the thread first?

>>7962381

Do you ever suspect that the models you have just described may just be absolute nonsense?

I don't mean that in a derogatory fashion, but rather that we are attempting to understand something that still lies far beyond our technological expertise to investigate further.

I remember seeing these elaborate diagrams which explained, almost perfectly, the motions of the planets, sun and moon around the Earth. With the Earth being the center of the solar system.

The people who made these diagrams were, for their time, highly intelligent and well respected mathematicians and astronomers. Yet they were basing their calculations off an entirely flawed concept. That the Earth was at the center..

I sometimes wonder if that is the state of our science now with respect to the topic at hand.

And its sort of funny, because until someone figures it out we have no way of knowing.

>>7962408

Ah, call me dumb or whatever, yes I did. I thought the gif and question was pertinent.

Did I done goof?

>>7962418
That's why they're called models, because they model something

whether or not the idea behind the model is what's actually happening doesn't change whether the model is useful

>>7962387

Thank you for your reply. I feel my brain cells swelling a little bit at a time with each reply from posters.

But at the risk of sounding like Im splitting hairs, from your description it seems like all I am doing now is exchanging "what is a wave of energy" for "what is a field"

>>7962444

oh for sure, yes, I understand that.

Like I said i was not intending my comment to be derogatory, I was just curious about peoples views on the state of science.

But thats really off topic, what I was really interested in was seeing if there was a way to visulise, or some how conceptualize energy ( or fields ) in a way that could make sense to me.

Like imagining a void in the depths of space and visualizing a photon traveling through it, and understanding why it behaves as a wave and how it is interacting with the "fabric" of space.

>>7962418

We have models because they're confirmed by experimental data. It's usually a pretty safe bet that our picture is fairly accurate in some way.

A good counter-example however would be something like Dark Matter, which physicists believe to exist, because the only way to explain the movements of galaxies given our current models of understanding, necessitates the existence of large amounts of mass, somewhere, acting upon them. but we can't see them. the obvious conclusion to draw from this is that, y'know, maybe all that dark matter actually really isn't there, and it's just your models that are completely bunk.

>>7962448
>from your description it seems like all I am doing now is exchanging "what is a wave of energy" for "what is a field"

Well a field has a precise mathematical definition, and in the case of quantum field theory, fields are really classified by their spin. But when all of that is put aside, all we can really say is that an electron field is just an everywhere electron-ness from which electrons and positrons can be created.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fxeb3Pc4PA4

I love MinutePhysics, and this video may be helpful for you to visualize these things. Watch the next video in the series (forces) as well.

>>7962473
>implying gravitational lensing caused by large concentrations of dark matter has not been observed

>>7962378

Moreso, every light effect/photon interaction can be modeled by assuming the photon moves in every possible way simultaniously, with a probability attached to every path it can take. Reality then is the sum of all the possibilities.

>>7962418

You're thinking of Ptolemy's work

Smart guy. Set astronomy back 1000 years because his models were so accurate

>>7963516

Glad that astronomy by and large is fucking useless...

>>7962448
A field is a thing that has a value of some sort (a number, or complex number, or vector, or tensor, or whatever) at every point in space.

This sounds incredibly uninformative because it is. Fields are pretty much the basic generic mathematical objects current theories are built out of.