Watching a few things on science lately and the whole theory of what light is seems to be a bit up the boo-aye. I'm sure there's other theories out there that I've not an inkling about but here's my take on the subject....
What if I said to you that light is neither a particle or a wave - that when its seen, the experience of light is based solely on the perception of the viewer.
Light is 'created' (in a way) when a collision occurs between two bodies. When the collision occurs a kinetic wave is produced. If that kinetic wave is moving at a certain frequency, the human eye will percieve it as light. When the wave starts to slow down, the human ear can percieve it as sound.
This happens regardless of what those two 'bodies' are. They can be hands or atoms.
And of course some animals don't see or hear the same frequencies that humans do, so naturally they would perceive a kinetic wave in a different fashion.
So there you go.
In the respect that both sound and light are propagation of energy you are somewhat correct. However, the forms of propagation are quite different.
ReplyDeleteSound is a propagation of density waves through a medium. Without a medium there is no sound. Sound operates exactly like waves on the ocean. The speed of the wave is relative to medium.
Light does not travel through a medium. Einstein discovered that when you measure the speed of light it is always measured as the same speed. This means if you accelerate to half the speed of light compared to say your friends on earth you will experience light travelling at the speed of light, not one and a half the speed of light. Light has a behaviour that is both probabilistic and atomic. By atomic I mean that there are 'particles' of light which are indivisible. You can't get half a photon. The behaviour at the quantum level is thus fundamentally different to waves in a medium such as sound. For those who want a excellent introduction to the behaviour of light in QM I highly recommend QED by Richard Feynman.