Quote:
Originally Posted by eyezen
Put simply radio waves and light waves are both forms electromagnetic radiation that differ only in frequency. They both travel at "the speed of light" which Juggles correctly stated is less than "c" in an atmosphere.
Now frequency becomes important when the waves travels through a medium (again in simple terms a radio wave will slow down going through a wall but a light wave is completely stopped) but in this scenario is unimportant.
Sound waves are a different animal, they are compressions of the air around us and when those differences hit our eardrums we "hear" those differences. Hence why sound doesn't propagate in space.
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Thanks. That is the kind of physics knowledge that I am seeking. I was wondering if radio waves were electro-magnetic. That makes much more sense than them being a physical product of the atmosphere such as the noise made by a passing car.
Now what is the speed of radio waves in a vacuum? Is it c or something less? Do electro-magnetic waves travel at different speeds or all at the same speed regardless of frequency?
I guess that I need to do some research on light waves as well. I never grasped that they were simply electro-magnetic radiation. I always thought that light was a physical substance that existed and traveled in wave form. I never did understand exactly what constituted a wave particle. I know that I had an excellent college physics class (taught by the Dean of Yale's physics department), but I must not have fully comprehended what was being taught regarding this.