Electromagnetic Waves

D Vautier
09/2021

I decided to write something on electromagnetic (EM) waves because I always questioned the usual explanations which did not make much sense to me or seemed incomplete or just totally flakey.  In fact I never really found any answer why EM transmission tended to act the way scientists say it does.  So I needed to do a deeper study mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. I didn’t footnote anything because the data here is all in the public domain.  When I speculate on things I do try to qualify my own ideas with the usual excuses like “I think” and “it seems that” and “perhaps” and I do try to resist a lot of pure pure speculation.  But sometimes you have to speculate.

Please be patient with some of my apparent digressions because they are really basic physics and they need to be considered.  I address the ideas of deep space, micro space, deep time and micro time for a very good reason.  Only with these concepts in perspective can we begin to get our brains around the immensity of this whold EM thing and how they think it works. 

Electromagnetic waves exist all around us in cell phones, radios, TVs, light, and influences just about every aspect of our day-to-day lives.  They also go through just about everything; in fact scientists have constructed special chambers deep underground which are somewhat resistant to EM but not entirely.  The part EM plays in our very existence is actually quite overwhelming.  So what are these electromagnetic waves anyway?  Even the word itself is scary and mysterious.

Scientists tell us the universe consists of matter and energy as well as other unknown stuff like dark matter and dark energy.  All the matter and energy that we observe is interacting and communicating but the world is absolutely flooded everywhere with these EM waves of every sort, kind and description.  The EM thing is like the big stirring stick that causes everything to happen quite litterally.  It is the metaphysical glue that holds everything together, causes change and destroys things. 

Years of testing with sensitive instruments attempt to describe EM waves.  They have two axes, one electro and the other magnetic.  I like to use the term “electro” here since electric is associated with electricity and the two are not at all the same thing.  So these two forces, electro and magnetic, propagate forward at right angles and travel at light speed and move in waves.  That's a lot of confusing ideas but there’s still more.  They exhibit both particle and wave characterizes.  What!  They are also counter-polar which means that when the wave front is electro positive it is magnetically negative and at the null point has no charge so as it propagates it alternates or sort of pulses.  That all looks really snazzy in a picture but what does it all mean and how can you explain it?  A simple picture doesn’t explain very much about an EM wave or how it works or what it’s made of or, most importantly, how it gets generated with those two alternating wave forces acting at right angles and switching polarity all the time.  There's a lot of stuff to understand here.  So as I began exploring these questions, I first have to talk about the very space itself which allows EM waves to travel.

Space fabric

What is space?  Any kind of space will do; occupied space, space in water, space in vacuum, just plain space?  Anything that is not void is space.  To have space there has to be some kind of thing in it or something happening to it for space to exist and that thing or things is either the presence of matter or simply the presence of EM waves.  That would make some kind of sense.  But it’s mostly EM activity because there is not very much actual mass in the universe, (estimated at just .42e-20 which is 42 with 20 zeros in front) which is actually a very small amount of mass).  So clearly, most of the universe is space.  In fact an awful lot of the universe is space.

Space seems then to be some kind of fabric once it gets “informed” by EM waves.  The fabric just doesn’t sit there but it is filled constantly with little and big disruptions or wrinkles to its fabric all the time.  The disruptions are mostly or entirely EM waves that come in all shapes and sizes and from all directions, big and small, strong and weak. The EM waves consist of many bundles of energy they call photons packets, which exhibit both wave and particle characteristics.  Really really weird. I’ll talk about photons later.

To describe EM waves we often use the analogy of a water surface to illustrate wave movement through space.  Think of a three dimension lake surface where waves can move in all directions.  Or think of an expanding balloon of waves but this balloon is 3 dimensional so The it doesn’t have air behind it.  It just has more balloon.

Think also of space fabric as a bunch of curtains; very big, very thin and delicate and very close together. A photon packet comes along and pushes the first curtain which pushes the second and so forth.  This is another way to explain it.  But all this works at light speed. So wow!! And the curtains are hung in all directions. So double wow!!   

I wonder what would happen if a section of space could be found somewhere without its fabric being disturbed, disrupted, and "informed".  It seems that undisturbed space fabric just may not exist or even need to exist at all, a purely philosophical question.  But once space closes in it’s impossible to keep the EM waves out.  Space can be defined as a fabric disrupted by, or rather "informed" by EM waves or occupied by matter.  If this does not happen the space no longer exists and is just void, or better said - nothing.

Again I reiterate:  Some understanding of deep space, micro space, deep time and micro time are the only way to even begin to see this thing and how it works.

Deep Space

Very small concepts can be appreciated better by first looking at very big concepts so lets look at deep space.  There's nothing bigger than that. The universe has gotten very big after growing for a hefty 13 billion years.  It’s so big that we have to use a big yardstick, the light year to measure anything.  One light year is eponymously the distance light travels in a year.  There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year and light travels 186,000 per second so we get a yardstick that is 5.8 with 11 zeros after it or 5,800,000,000,000 miles or 5.8e+12.  That’s a big yardstick.  We then casually talk about distant galaxies that are thousands of light years away.  These are truly big distances.  The diameter of the universe is 93 billion light years but some believe it folds back on itself like a doughnut. Whatever. If we try to measure the diameter of the universe in miles we get a number that is so big that it no longer means anything anyway.  This idea of incomprehensible space is referred to as deep space because it’s so humongous that we cant really grasp it in physical terms.

Micro Space

Lets go the other way into micro space.  How small can we really go?  Way smaller.

Just as the light year was the yardstick for big distances the nanometer is the common yard stick for small things and this yard stick is really not small enough. It is .0000000001 of a meter or 1 with nine zeros in front, or .1e-9, or one billionth of a meter.  Line up 9 billion little nm things and you get a meter.  With the NM we are somewhat comfortably into micro space.  An average wave length of visible light is around 600 nm.  An average iron atom has a radius  of .123 NM and that’s a pretty big atom.

To get to smaller stuff the nm is too big and instead we need to use the Fermi (FM) which is quite a bit smaller coming in at .1e-15 which is 1 with 15 zeros in front of it so now things are getting really small.  The size of a helium nucleus is 1 FM (coincidence?) but the size of the helium atom including electrons is an amazing 100,000 times bigger which brings it up to around one NM in size.  Later when looking at the two elementary particles, the electron and the quark we will definitely have to use FM.  Many believe there are just two elementary particles because all the other small particles they keep discovering are massless and may not be particles at all.

Deep Time

The earth is 4.5 billion years old give or take a few billion I suppose.  The universe is 13.7 billion years old and getting older.  By using optical and radio telescopes they developed ways to measure this so if we want to see the number of seconds the universe has been around we get some huge number like 4e+17 seconds which is many gazillion and the age of the earth is 1.4e+17 seconds which is just a few less gazillion.  If the universe continues to expand it will die in 20 to 30 billion years which is also a long time. The point here is that deep time is a long long time.  This is to give you a feeling that time can be very short also.

Micro Time

Let’s generate a nice radio wave say about a mile long which is about right as radio waves go.  I picked a one mile wave length because it’s easier to see the picture.  To create a wave that is a mile long you have to get a huge amount of electrons in an antenna to move back and forth 372,000 (186,000 x 2) times per second.  That’s a lot of movement within one second.  It gets better. A microwave oven microwave is about 2 inches long.  A standard microwave is longer but the 2 inch wave effects water better.  So we will need around 23.4 billion movements per second from the electrons to generate an average 2 inch microwave.  Yellow light has a wave length of 580 nm which means it’s really short.  All visible light has very short wavelengths.  To create visible light electrons are back and forth moving quite fast.

Electricity

I want to go back to real basic electricity.  Plain old electricity theory maintains there is a flow of electrons that drives motors, electronic circuits and creates light.  These electrons get carried around through conductive wire such as copper or aluminum.  The materials contain atoms that have open outer shells and therefore lots of “range land” where free electrons (ions) can roam around either from one atom to another or just run around undisturbed. Many materials are conductors which means “homeless” electrons travel through and around atomic structures.  When a source of electricity, in this case a swarm of electrons, enter a conductive wire and overwhelm the local area, that swarm of electrons displaces or pushes on other free floating electrons and outer shell electrons down the wire which displace more electrons further on and this chain reaction creates an electrical flow.  The physical distance that electrons move in the wire is extremely small, maybe a few NMs, yet the resultant current, as we well know, is huge and immediate.  The wire can be quite long but an electric charge at one end is instantaneously transmitted to the other end by billions upon billions of electrons pushing and displacing each other down that length of wire.

It's also nice if there is something on the other end of the wire pulling these electrons such as a material that is short of electrons like a negative battery terminal or ground which can freely give or take unlimited electrons.

This flow of electrons create friction which produces heat and we get light from heat.  It powers electronic circuits.  It drives solenoids and motors.  Our whole modern world is based on motors, lights, electronic circuits and solenoids.

As we all know long distance transmission requires high voltage (less loss) which is best done with alternating current transformers which means that the electrons move back and forth as they move forth.

Now forget all about this brief discussion of electricity because we have to make a clear distinction between common everyday street-corner electricity that we know and use all the time and that particular mysterious electro force which is involved in the generation of EM waves and which does not live in wires.  The term “electro” is different from electricity.  But the electro force and the magnetic force are complementary and very much tied together.  Magnetism makes electro force.  It moves electrons. Electro force makes magnetism which turns motors and moves solenoids.  A turning magnet has magnetic fields which can drive electrons.  Generators generate electron movement.  Likewise, solenoids and motors are magnets that are in turn driven by electron movement.  There is a very strong relationship because EM waves are made up of both forces.

Atomic theory

The early Greeks said everything was made out of atoms.  They were on the right trail, but it took a long time for science to progress any further then guessing about atoms.  We needed to develop an atomic theory that could better explain all kinds of other things that were going on in our universe.  So some really smart people, the early alchemists, separated basic elements from compounds and found things which can’t be broken down any more. They found elements.  They then determined that these elements consisted of what they called atoms which could account for all the different atomic weights.  An atom, they suggested is like a miniature solar system which has these two particle types in the center, a certain number of protons and neutrons, and flying around them in different orbits or shells are particles called electrons.  The electron was determined to exist because of a difference between what an atom should weigh and what it did weigh.  A Proton consists of three quarks.  So does a neutron.  The neutrons are a way to explain how protons can stay together.  The quarks in a proton are slightly positive whereas neutrons have no charge because the quarks cancel each other out and manage to keep the nucleus together.  Quarks and electrons are the two fundamental particles of the universe and can’t be broken down any more.  The entire universe consists of these two fundamental particles.

Electrons

So what is an electron?  Tough question.  Nobody really knows. It is perhaps the most mysterious of all sub-atomic particles, in fact the only one in most respects that really counts.  We know it’s very small and it moves very fast and probably spins very fast.  Electrons may not have much mass or at least mass the way we understand it and electrons appear to occupy no space which seems impossible.  An electron is considered a geometrical point that has location but no dimension but it does exist because it has charge and mass.  The mass of an electron can be calculated at 1/1836 the mass of a single proton so that makes it pretty light and makes it agile enough to move and reverse direction and spin very fast if it does spin which I think it does.  If an electron stopped moving and spinning it would probably cease to exist. Think of it.  These little particles are responsible for just about everything that goes on in the universe; light, heat, EM waves, magnetism, gravity, conductivity, electricity, radio, x-ray, radar, chemistry, TV, H-bombs and even life itself.  That’s a lot of stuff.  Electrons therefore become the storehouse of the energy of the universe and explain how energy moves around and gets transferred.  They are the main way the universe communicates and functions.  Electrons are flying around in all matter, even the densest, like a diamond, which consists of a very complex molecular structure.  In the micro universe there’s still lots of room between and among molecules.

Photons

What is a photon or rather a photon packet?  It may be a way for scientists to explain a very complex operation involving many electrons.  Photons don’t really exist as matter.  Rather, a photon or photon packet is pure energy and used as a way to explain what propagates from highly agitated electrons under most circumstances and causes disruptions in space fabric.  Imagine if you blow gently on a small paper fan your breath will move air which will cause the paper fan to spin.  In the same sense if you cause the untold billions of free electrons in an antenna wire to move one way then back the other way 186000 times in a second you create a photon packet that broadcasts outward with a wave length of around one mile.  If you can maintain all these electrons moving back and forth in this antenna doing their little dance you create what is called a standing wave or a continuous photon packet flow.  Photon packets are wrinkles in the space fabric and exists as pure energy generated by synchronized electrons.  It’s like shaking a bed sheet.  The energy keeps moving outward.

Photon packets are also like infinite peanut butter which keeps getting spread thinner and thinner as they move but this is special infinite peanut butter.  Let me explain.  Sirius is the brightest star and is 8.6 light years away.  Sirius twinkles as do all stars.  That is because a single fine stream of photons, having traveled a very great distance, influenced by atmosphere, is striking one small area of our retina, just enough to get a twinkle.  It is a very fine point of light.  Put a telescope on Sirius and magnify it 100 times, 1,000 times, 10,000 times and it’s still just a point of light - just one photon stream.  Put 2 or 4 or six telescopes in different parts of the world and you still get a point of light.  Infinite peanut butter.

Another way to explain this infinite peanut butter is to consider the James Webb telescope (JWST) which has been able to discover galaxy clusters over 30 billion light years away.  It uses 370 square feet of mirror collection power to come up with a small pinpoint image of light that can activate a dozen pixels or so.  After 30 billion light years of stretching the peanut butter is still stretching.  

So how do trillions and trillions of electrons operate together in perfect synchronization to produce EM waves.  It’s through the process of murmuration.  We see murmurations with birds where huge flocks fly in graceful synchronization without a single collision.  The lead bird can be hundreds of birds away and when it turns, all the birds turn.  How do they do that?  Certainly not by sight.  A bird has a magnet in it’s head.  Maybe they have EM communication?  Maybe they work like electrons?  But we're talking about a kind of super-murmuration here with electrons because we have an almost infinite number of birds.

Magnetism

Long ago people found that some metals attracted other metals.  The three main metals were iron, cobalt and nickel but there are several others that have this property.  So how does magnetic force work?  The three metals mentioned above have outer shells or valence shells with only two electrons.  Valence shells are farther from the center of the atom and so these electrons can shift their orbits easily as they spin around the nucleus.  They have an advantage being outer shell electrons to influence the behavior of the metal. They can also easily break away from the molecule and move around as free ions so magnetic metals are also conductors of electricity.  The electrons in these metals are rotating around their nuclei very fast, as expected.  They are also probably spinning.  Some scientists say that fundamental particles can’t spin or they can only spin half way, whatever that means, or they can’t spin at all because they have no dimension.  But because electrons are spinning around a nucleus implies they probably are also spinning relative to the nucleus.  Electrons also seem to have a north pole and a south pole but they may also be spinning on their side and by spinning that way may explain a lot.

A bar of iron can gain magnetism by applying an electric force or using various other methods.  The valence electrons in the molecules can flip their orbits so that their north poles appear to be pointing in the same direction and spinning in the same direction thus creating another force, a magnetic force.  When we get a very large group of these valence electrons spinning in the same direction and pointing the same way we get a magnetic field because all the north poles of all the electrons are pointing north.  It seems that the magnetic component of EM comes from the polarization of the electron itself.

Electromagnetic waves

I can perhaps explain EM waves in two ways.  The first I call “shifting”.  The second I call “shell jumping”.  Shell jumping is the usual way electrons can produce smaller visible EM waves and it is the theory that science generally promotes.  As the waves get longer the other theory of “shifting” may manifest.  I think this theory of electron shifting can explain a lot easier the alternate electro and magnetic components that constitute any EM wave.

Radio Waves

Let us look at something bigger than a 700 nm wave length where visible light lives and examine radio waves which are quite a bit longer wavelength. For many years inventors suspected that there was something out there lurking in the either that could be captured, somehow controlled and used to communicate over distance.  Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy experimented with different devices.  He was the first to transmit a radio wave across a field then over a hill and eventually from Europe to America.  He developed huge rather crude instruments to transmit and receive radio broadcasts initially in Morse code.

Marconi was an inventor, not a theory guy so he didn’t really understand why or how things worked.  All he knew was that he got them to work by simply loading an antenna with highly oscillating electrons and boiling off photon packets at a specific frequency and then by sympathetic vibration (oscillation actually), detecting the photon packets.

LC circuits

EM radiation at radio frequency suggests the movement of large amounts of electrons back and forth. The usual unit of frequency is kilohertz (khz) which means one thousand oscillations per second so for example electrons moving back and forth at 186 khz produce a mile long wave.  Makes sense.

So in order to get electrons moving at high frequencies like 186 khz an LC circuit had to be invented which is a closed electronic circuit consisting of induction coil (L) and capacitor (C).  Without getting too technical, this circuit acts like a small super charged ping-pong table and when electricity is applied to it the electrons begin to osculate very fast from one plate of the capacitor through the coil to the other plate of the capacitor. The rate of osculation is controlled by different characteristics of the coil and capacitor.

Electrons are allowed to share the circuit and move to an antenna device where they continue to oscillate.  It is here at the antenna that the electrons begin to boil off EM waves as photon packets into space.

Shifting

Massive numbers of oscillating electrons murmurate, which means they do the same thing exactly the same way together and behave just like a very huge flock of birds.  We sort of know that electrons seem to have a north and south pole because of the ability of certain materials to retain magnetism.  We have to also assume that one side of an electron behaves differently from the other side and carries a different charge.  So as these untold billions of particles are going back and forth very fast they appear to be spinning not upright but on their sides.  This may explain the two components of the EM wave, the alternating electro portion and likewise the alternating magnetic portion.  The spinning electron may produce the magnetic force from it's pole and the "electro" force from its equator.

Shell Jumping

When you turn on a light bulb electric current flows through a filament of tungsten.  The flow of electrons makes the atoms of tungsten in the filament get agitated and start vibrating.  Then they get hot because they get bounced around by the friction of these electron intruders.  Heat accelerates electrons in the shells of the atom and some electrons jump into higher shells which forces other electrons to jump to still higher shells.  Finally when the outer shell gets full the electrons are forced to slow down and return to where they belong and to do this they have to give off energy.  The precise way they release photon packages is determined by the intensity of the heat and the composition of the atom, in this case the tungsten atom which likes to generate a lot of waves around 400 to 700 NM or so which is visible light, and also which is close to the distance between the outer shell and the next one in.  Tungsten has six shells.  The fourth shell is full.  The fifth shell is almost full.  The sixth shell is practically empty.  Electrons that have to return from the sixth to the fifth shell are in the range for generating a wave length around 400 to 700 NM.  This theory still doesn’t explain a lot of things like the alternating electro and magnetic component but I have some ideas how it may occur.

When large numbers of electrons are forced to return to their home shells they lose energy and similar to larger EM waves murmurate or do the shell return trip at the same time and rotate the same way. Since the distance back to their home shell is quite short they produce waves in the visible spectrum.  Since electrons are polar we also assume that one side of an electron behaves differently from the other side and carries a different force.  So the process of murmuration causes huge numbers of electrons to act in unison, to rotate and spin together producing visible EM waves with the expected electro and magnetic components.

When massive numbers of electrons oscillate in unison which they seen to like to do, the electrons generate an electric component from their spinning motion and at the same time a magnetic component from their poles, thus an EM wave. This is probably the best way to explain it.