On 05/26/2011 01:33 PM, Wm. Scott Smith wrote:
I realize that this is routinely trivialized, rationalized away and ignored; nonetheless, those who do so are merely dancing around the real question here! "Why are em fields perpendicular (when one is inducing the other, purely speaking?)"
Are they really doing that? Or that is just an abstract construct, introduced to try to give some foundation/explanation for the conservative nature of the field?
This is a fascinating question, especially because these two fields are perhaps the only things in nature wherein a force in one direction causes an "An equal and perpendicular reaction!"
Well, the idea I propose is that a perpendicular field manifests only when an interaction happens. That is, the magnetic field does not exist "inside" the wave, it's just a manifestation of the wave. The same with the electric field. Magnetic and electric fields are just modes of expression of the wave, so, the explanation for their direction must be seek in their interactions with matter and other waves, not in the waves themselves.
The other mystery about all of this is that this question probably holds the secret to the underlying nature of a photon: why does this oscillating em field traverse space at the speed of light, and without the dispersion of individual photons. Even if you hold that the waveform travels ahead of the "particle aspect" of the photon, this is just a superpositional state of possible outcomes, but all of those outcomes still result in a single "particle aspect" traversing one path, and arriving as one particle.
It seems there are a number of concepts going on: - perpendicular magnetic vs. electrical waves - perpendicular radiative component vs. acceleration vector of an electrostatic charge - potential energy vs. kinetic energy waves - matter waves (?) - wavefunctions Shouldn't we try to pinpoint what's the relation between these concepts, if they are indeed related? By the way, Frank Z., can you explain how can you talk about "the potential energy of an electromagnetic wave", and say that it's equal to mc², when an electromagnetic wave is massless? Are you saying that its potential energy is zero? Regards, Mauro
