A wave of what? (split from How does the light from distant stars get to our eyes?)

[Airbrush]

13 hours ago, gib65 said:

How does the light from distant stars get to our eyes?

When I try to answer this question, I think of light traveling through the vacuum of empty space as photons.  But if light is both a particle AND a wave, when light travels through space, it is a wave of WHAT?  There is no medium, no ether, to transmit a wave.

[exchemist]

48 minutes ago, Airbrush said:

When I try to answer this question, I think of light traveling through the vacuum of empty space as photons.  But if light is both a particle AND a wave, when light travels through space, it is a wave of WHAT?  There is no medium, no ether, to transmit a wave.

Waves of alternating electric and magnetic fields, at right angles to one another and to the direction of propagation. Pictures, and explanations, of this can be found in many places, for instance here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation 

Edited December 31, 2022 by exchemist

[Lorentz Jr]

59 minutes ago, exchemist said:

when light travels through space, it is a wave of WHAT?  There is no medium, no ether, to transmit a wave.

Currently, the most successful theory of subatomic physics is quantum field theory, which models all matter and energy as wavelike disturbances in "fields". It doesn't specify what fields are, but they permeate all of space (and there are almost 20 of them), and the electromagnetic field is the basis of light.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Lorentz Jr

[Mordred]

17 hours ago, Airbrush said:

When I try to answer this question, I think of light traveling through the vacuum of empty space as photons.  But if light is both a particle AND a wave, when light travels through space, it is a wave of WHAT?  There is no medium, no ether, to transmit a wave.

While both answers provided are good the QFT viewpoint may help. As Lorentz Jr and Exchemist mentioned you have the fields involved. The EM field being a composite field as per Maxwell. As that field becomes perturbed the anisotropic disturbances generate potential energy differences. This in turn generates an increase in the particle number density of gauge photons for the EM field as per the momentum force mediator. So in essence a light beam generates its own medium comprised of gauge bosons the gauge photon however it will be offshell in this case. The photon becomes real as per the quanta of action terms.

So in essence one could view it as the photon generates its own localized medium via the EM field permutations. In QFT that's done via the creation/annihilation operators via the Lorentz invariant Klein_Gordon equations.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Mordred

[exchemist]

2 hours ago, Lorentz Jr said:

Currently, the most successful theory of subatomic physics is quantum field theory, which models all matter and energy as wavelike disturbances in "fields". It doesn't specify what fields are, but they permeate all of space (and there are almost 20 of them), and the electromagnetic field is the basis of light.

You are attributing to me something said by @Airbrush

[Lorentz Jr]

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

You are attributing to me something said by @Airbrush

Hmmmmm... Not sure how that happened. 🤔

Maybe I should blame it on @Genady. He explained how to quote text selections, and I probably quoted the quotation in your post. 😶

[Genady]

6 minutes ago, Lorentz Jr said:

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

You are attributing to me something said by @Airbrush

Hmmmmm... Not sure how that happened. 🤔

Maybe I should blame it on @Genady. He explained how to quote text selections, and I probably quoted the quotation in your post. 😶

Hmmmm... I quoted a quotation several times and it worked fine. Just like this one above, nested in each other. But you need to select the quotation completely. Perhaps if you select it partially it gets messed up.

[Lorentz Jr]

3 minutes ago, Genady said:

I probably quoted the quotation in your post. 😶

Yep. That's what I did. (partial)

Edited January 1, 2023 by Lorentz Jr

[studiot]

Quote

A wave of what? (split from How does the light from distant stars get to our eyes?)

A small comment here.

People are failing to distinguish between a wave and a wavefront, which is only an infinitesimal part of a wave.

 

5 hours ago, LaurieAG said:

Modelling the locations of in transit photons emitted from rotating sources

Thank you for bringing this website to my attention, I have not heard of it, but see it has been going some years on and off. +1

Edited January 1, 2023 by studiot