To begin our study of light, we’re actually going to first discuss waves in general. For example, what happens when a pebble is thrown into a pond?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown in the image above, where the pebble enters, the water starts to oscillate up and down. The “pieces” of water right next to where the pebble entered “feel” the water next to them going up and down, and they start to move up and down, too. The disturbance in the water moves outward as more pieces of water start to move up and down. The water in each place only moved up and down, but a wave moved outward from where the pebble entered the water. No water moved outward—what moved outward is the disturbance in the pond's surface. The outward motion of the disturbance transports energy from one place (the location where the pebble entered the water) to another (all points outward from the pebble entry point). This example illustrates that a wave is really a mechanism by which energy gets transported from one location to another.

Electric fields and magnetic fields can be disturbed in a similar way to the surface of a pond. When a stationary charged particle begins to vibrate (or more generally, if it is accelerated), the electric field that surrounds the particle becomes disturbed. Changing electric fields create magnetic fields, so a moving charge creates a disturbance in both the electric field and magnetic field near the charged particle. The outward moving disturbance in the electromagnetic field is an electromagnetic wave. The phenomenon that we refer to as “light” is simply an electromagnetic wave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light (or any other wave) is characterized by its wavelength or its frequency. For any wave, the wavelength is the distance between two consecutive peaks. If you stand at one particular point and count how many peaks pass by you per second, this number is the frequency.

Mathematically, the wavelength of light is usually referred to with the letter l or the Greek letter lambda λ. The frequency is usually referred to with the letter f or the Greek letter nu Since frequency is the number of waves that pass by a point per second, and the wavelength is the distance between consecutive peaks of that wave, you can determine the speed of the wave by multiplying these two numbers, that is: c = λν. If we look at the units, the wavelength is measured in some unit of distance, and frequency is measured as some number that is unitless (number of waves) per some unit of time, so by multiplying wavelength times frequency, you get distance per time, which is the proper unit for a speed.

White light (for example, what comes out of a flashlight) is actually made up of many waves that each exhibit one of the different colors of light (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). The reason that different waves of light appear to be different colors of light is that the color of a light wave depends on its wavelength. For example, the wavelength of blue light is about 450 nanometers, while the wavelength of red light is about 700 nanometers. A light source that gives off white light is, therefore, emitting multiple waves of light with a wide range of wavelengths from 450 nanometers through 700 nanometers. All of these light waves move at the same speed (the speed of light), so you can determine their frequencies and see that red light has a lower frequency than blue light.

 

 

The wavelength of light can be extremely long (kilometers in length!) or smaller than the nucleus of an atom (one-millionth of a nanometer!)—so, what do we call light that has a wavelength longer or shorter than the visible light that we are used to? Well, here is one example: light that has a wavelength just longer than red is called infrared light. The next example is light with a wavelength just shorter than violet light, which is called ultraviolet light. The entire range of possible types of light, from the longest wavelengths (radio waves) to the shortest wavelengths (gamma rays) is called the electromagnetic spectrum.

You may have learned in another course that light is peculiar in that it can be described (as we just did) as being a wave, but in some experiments, it behaves and can be described more accurately, as a particle. When we describe light as a particle, we'll refer to an individual "packet" of light as a photon. You can still refer to the wavelength and the frequency of that photon, even though you are considering it to be a particle rather than a wave. If you go back to the very first discussion at the beginning of this page, we talked about how waves transport energy. So, each photon of light does carry energy, and the amount of energy depends on the wavelength or frequency of that photon. The equation is:

 

 

 

 

E = hν; or equivalently: E = hc/λ

 

 

 

In these equations, E is energy, h is Planck's constant, and c is the speed of light. ​Before we discuss the entire electromagnetic spectrum in detail, we will next discuss how astronomers represent the range of light emitted by a source in a diagram or image called a spectrum.