berkeman said:
In what ways? I mean the actual fields are not color coded like that, and it's just a snapshot in time of the traveling wave moving to the right, but otherwise it seems to be fairly accurate...
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I'd argue that this isn't even what EM waves 'look like'. Or, rather, it's only part of what an EM wave looks like. This is a diagram. A representation showing how the electric and magnetic field vectors oscillate over time and how they are oriented perpendicular to each other.
The big issue here is that defining what light 'looks like' is rather ambiguous in its meaning. If this were a diagram of a water wave (minus the red e-field wave) it would be more intuitive since we can almost immediately understand that the diagram represents the height of the water, since the height of a water wave is something we can see and understand without any knowledge of physics.
But, unlike a water wave, an EM wave has no easy to see physical effects that we are used to observing in our everyday lives. You can't see the strength and direction of a field, after all, and relating these wavy lines to how charged particles behave is much more complicated than understanding that the height of the line on a diagram represents the height of a water wave.
If we interpret 'is this what does an EM wave look like' to mean 'does this accurately represent how an EM wave behaves' we get a much clearer question, to which the answer is "yes, for a single point in space over time or a line through space at a single point in time this accurately represents the field strengths and orientation of a certain EM wave."
But this isn't the only viable diagram. See this picture:
This also represents an EM wave. But instead of showing the field vectors for a single point or line, I believe it is showing regions of similar field strength and direction. EM waves also 'look' like this.
Ibix said:
The point is that they don't "look like" anything at all because they're not something you can bounce something off to form an image. The visualisations you see are illustrative, but that's all.
In the end that is what it boils down to. Every picture, illustration, or diagram of an EM wave is simply conveying some set of information to you. You can ask if EM waves 'look' like the illustrations only so long as you understand that you're using 'look' as shorthand for asking if the diagram is reasonably accurate in what it depicts.