I wanted to take a few minutes to write down some thoughts I’ve had lately concerning electricity and possibly light.  Some things that are probably well known to most of you but something that has always confused me when I think of radio waves, electro-magnetic waves, light waves and so forth.  Its very possible the thoughts I’m about to list are in error and if I find this to be the case then I will post another article to make corrections.  However, this site is mainly for sharing thoughts so I wanted to share a few.

When anyone talks about radio frequencies they always include the cool sounding word  “wave”.  We have radio waves floating all around us and know all there is to know about how to determine the actual size and amplitude and so forth, of them all.  However, for those of us trying to learn what is really physically going on, it seems that some of the verbage may actually be confusing matters.

For a simple example, I want to talk for a minute about AC electricity that we all use in our offices and homes.  AC electricity is generated at the power plant using huge generators that utilize the magnetic field of spinning magnets to generate the power.  The power it generates due to these spinning magnets is a type of energy that transforms from a negative to a positive charge 60 times a second.  That means that where DC electricity simply flows from one point on a battery to another point, AC electricity doesn’t really flow, or at least, not in the conventional sense of the word.  It rather vibrates back and forth between a positive and a negative charge.  As a result however, it doesn’t need a complete loop for it to start to flow, which makes it great for sending electricity across long wires that eventually reach our homes and computers.

Now, while I don’t want to get into a long discussion of AC electricity, lets think about how we talk about it.  It cycles 60 times a second and doing just a little bit of studying we will discover the proper way to say this is that it pulses at 60 Hertz.  To get an idea of what this means we begin to map out the flow from positive to negative charge over time and what we end up with is a Sine “wave”, that can be displayed on an Oscilloscope screen to help us look for problems.  This is in fact where I think the confusion of what is really going on, got started.  People saw a wave on the screen and started talking about radio waves flying through the air.  People listening, heard waves and associated them with the ocean and naturally think of the electrons in these waves as flowing up and down as they move from my house to yours.

However, I don’t think this is really the way they flow.  I think that what is really happening is that they are cycling back and forth from the radio transmitter between a positive and negative current at whatever rate we requested.  These charges are emitted from an antenna and continue to migrate across the open sky in straight lines, only changing their charge every specified amount of time.  On the receiving end, the receiver and antenna are properly timed and have the proper length to receive the total amount of the cycled charge in order to display it for our eyes or ears on the other end.  This is why an Antenna has to be a certain length to receive certain signals.  If its length were too short to receive an even amount of the charged electrons flowing through the air, then it would essentially be cutting off the signal and wouldn’t receive its nice even chunks of positive and negative charge streams.

So the word wave, is really meant to help us see the waves on paper over time, not the actual path taken by these streams of energy as they propagate our world.

 –glenn hancock