How can light travel through a vacuum

The molecules in the water act as the medium, and are oscillating and pushing all neighboring molecules causing a domino effect outwards. One thought I had is, if light is made of something then it just moves outwards from the point of origin in whatever direction the light was headed. A photon is an elementary particle, the quantum of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation, and the force carrier for the electromagnetic force, even when static via virtual photons.

The effects of this force are easily observable at both the microscopic and macroscopic level, because the photon has no rest mass; this allows for interactions at long distances.

Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave—particle duality, exhibiting properties of both waves and particles.

For example, a single photon may be refracted by a lens or exhibit wave interference with itself, but also act as a particle giving a definite result when its position is measured. The video talks about the particle-wave duality of an electron. So a single electron can act as a wave, but when it hits something it hits only one place.

Is that the same for photons? Thought Experiment : Out in the vacuum of space there is a huge hollow sphere 1 light year in radius. Inside is just vaccuum, and at the exact center a flash of light is emitted in all directions from a point source.

That's How can there be enough photons to hit every spot inside the surface area of this huge sphere? I understand that very little light would hit this far away, but even if non-zero at least some light is hitting.

If light really is made of photons and acts like a wave but each photon hits only one place, then it seems to me there must be an infinite amount of photons in that flash of light to hit so many places inside the sphere. Light isn't just an electromagnetic field. Light i. Just like for gravity, fields apparently permeate space. Even massive particles e. What you're calling a 'physical wave' is an emergent property of a underlying medium e.

This means, to the photon hitting your retina, it is also still on that star you are observing 10 light years away. How is this possible? Maybe John Wheeler was right when he told Richard Feynman that there is only one electron in the universe and it travels forward in time as an electron, then back in time as a positron and every electron we see is the same electron.

In other words is the energy of light infinite? Does it continue on without lose of energy….. I believe that Special Relativity says that the energy of light is infinite due to the very fact it has no mass. In reverse, this is also why something with mass to begin with. That information comes in the form of invisible wavelengths that includes wavelengths that we perceive as light. The visible retinas in our eyes are like tiny video screens where these particles are arranged into patterns that form into all the various objects we think are real objects.

This information is also converted into thoughts within our minds which are like computer processors that process that information. We are living in a computer simulation that is much more advanced than anything the characters in the program have built according to the information called the Beast.

Even then it can vary which suggests Your idea would mean we all live in a fairy tale. That is what you suggest,…right? Light EM radiation of any wavelength always travels at speed c, relative to any local inertial Lorentz frame. It could also be noted that the wavelength of an EM wave is not a characteristic of that wave alone; it also depends on the state of motion of the observer. Look up Cherenkov radiation to see what happens when light initially travels faster than it can through a particular substance, like water.

Light speed is not constant when traveling through any medium except pure vacuum. In fact that is why your pencil looks bent when you drop it in a glass of water.

The article started out nicely, but I lost interest as mistakes began to appear. The photoelectric effect was first observed by Heinrich Hertz in Einstein used the idea of photons to explain the photoelectric effect and derive the photoelectric equation. The photoelectric effect has nothing to do with black body radiation. This term was first used by Arthur Compton in Louis de Broglie used the dual nature of light to suggest that electrons, previously thought of as particles, also had wave characteristics and used this notion to explain the Bohr orbits in the hydrogen atom.

I gave up on the article after seeing these errors. Some Muslims? BCE has been in used in academia for decades. Only in Euro-centric texts have your assertions been true, McCowen. Over the last century or so, through commerce, most of the world has generally accepted the use of a Western calendar or use it along with their own for domestic purposes, like we here in the US still use Imperial units of measure that have to be converted to metric for international commerce.

Besides, the Gregorian calendar is an improved derivative of the Roman calendar — even the names of the months come from the Romans. Even in scattering, light remains coherent enough to convey an enormous amount of information. This establishes a stable structure for energies less than 1. In spite of the mass being defined as zero, for convenience in calculating atomic masses, there is actually an infinitesimal but non-zero mass for the photon that is required for calculations that describe its properties.

I think the temp inside a black hole would be extremely high since temperature seems to increase with mass. Comparing absolute zero to time stopping is very interesting though. To the observer they would appear the same. Theoretically there is no temperature in a black hole from any observer POV because time is stopped.

Although JALNIN does bring up that point, and he also brings up the point of increasing mass corresponding to increasing energy. In fact it should be infinitely cold. We don't think there's any "end" in the sense of some spatial boundary. Unless something changes drastically, there also won't be an end in time. The expansion looks like it will go on forever.

So that wouldn't give a maximum range. In principle a well-aimed beam would loop around the outside of the black hole and return to Earth. There aren't any black holes close enough to make this practical. Instead the bending of light by black holes is observed by their lensing effect on light coming from more distant objects. The amazing gravitational wave signals observed from merging black holes provide even more direct and convincing proof that black holes exist and follow the laws of General Relativity.

Follow-up on this answer. Learn more physics! Related Questions. Still Curious? Does light ever stop at a particular point or range Hi Jason, Light just keeps going and going until it bumps into something. Can light intensity reduce to a level where it's energy is less than 1 photon probably after travelling an almost infinite distance from a point source?

Mike W. Related: Special relativity holds up to a high-energy test. A light-year is the distance that light can travel in one year — about 6 trillion miles 10 trillion kilometers.

It's one way that astronomers and physicists measure immense distances across our universe. Light travels from the moon to our eyes in about 1 second, which means the moon is about 1 light-second away. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach our eyes, so the sun is about 8 light-minutes away. Light from Alpha Centauri , which is the nearest star system to our own, requires roughly 4. Stars and other objects beyond our solar system lie anywhere from a few light-years to a few billion light-years away.

And everything astronomers "see" in the distant universe is literally history. When astronomers study objects that are far away, the objects appear as they existed at the time that light left them. Related: Why the universe is all history. This principle allows astronomers to see the universe as it looked after the Big Bang , which took place about Objects that are 10 billion light-years away appear to astronomers as they looked 10 billion years ago — relatively soon after the beginning of the universe — rather than how they appear today.

As early as the 5th century, Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Aristotle disagreed on the nature of light speed. Empedocles thought that light, whatever it was made of, must travel and therefore, must have a rate of travel.

Aristotle wrote a rebuttal of Empedocles' view in his own treatise, On Sense and the Sensible , arguing that light, unlike sound and smell, is instantaneous. Aristotle was wrong, of course, but it would take hundreds of years for anyone to prove it.

Each person held a shielded lantern. One uncovered his lantern; when the other person saw the flash, he uncovered his too. But Galileo's experimental distance wasn't far enough for his participants to record the speed of light. He could only conclude that light traveled at least 10 times faster than sound. To create an astronomical clock, he recorded the precise timing of the eclipses of Jupiter's moon , Io, from Earth. He noticed that the eclipses appeared to lag the most when Jupiter and Earth were moving away from one another, showed up ahead of time when the planets were approaching and occurred on schedule when the planets were at their closest or farthest points — a rough version of the Doppler effect or redshift.

In a leap of intuition, he determined that light was taking measurable time to travel from Io to Earth. Since the size of the solar system and Earth's orbit wasn't yet accurately known, argued a paper in the American Journal of Physics , he was a bit off. But at last, scientists had a number to work with.