What medium does light travel on?

Question

isnt it odd a wave can only occur as a disturbance in amedium and yet light is a wave but has no medium or am i wrong help me out i just wanna get to the botton of what exactly light is ?

Answer 1

I've given that a lot of thought recently. With what we now know from relativity and quantum physics, I'm starting to believe space-time itself is a medium.

Not the "luminiferous aether," as thought in ancient times to fill space, but "quantum  foam," a concept that the fabric of space-time is a foam a hundred billion billion times smaller than a proton.

Luminiferous aether:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_ae...

Quantum foam:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foa...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfoEJoXEj...

Answer 2

Ouch, this one can be painful!

When you get into properties of atomic structure and quantum energy structure, things get pretty counter intuitive.  There is a whole branch of physics dedicated to this, and a lot of it depends upon wave / particle duality.

You see, light is able to reflect, interfere, refract, and break into a rainbow.  The only way to explain all these properties is with a particle / wave property.

Ugh, it took me about a dozen tries just to get that much.  Quantum physics is pretty painful in layman's terms.  I suggest trying the link.

Cheers

Answer 3

An electromagnetic wave is a transverse fluctuation of an electric field and a magnetic field.  So, in a sense, you can think of light as a disturbance in the electromagnetic field, which doesn't require a physical medium to exist.

Answer 4

light travel through air. as the sound does  

Answer 5

I have my own Fractal Foam Model of Universes. It's different from the Quantum Foam proposed by Wheeler, which is an offshoot of string theory. In my model, the ether foam is a scaled-down version of the cosmic foam. The cosmic foam of our universe is the ether foam of a super-universe, and the ether foam of our universe is the cosmic foam of a sub-universe.

E/M waves are sheer waves moving thru the ether foam like transverse acoustic waves in a solid at the speed of light. Pressure waves move thru the ether foam at the speed of gravity, which is billions of times faster than light.  

Answer 6

it is a electromagnetic wave it does not require a medium to travel it is the oscillating electric and magnetic wave