What is Light?

What, then, can light be, if not a transverse vibration? I consider this extremely important. Light cannot be anything but a longitudinal perturbation in the ether involving alternative compressions and rarefactions. Light can be nothing else other than a ‘sound wave in the ether’. … The Newtonian theory [light as a stream of particles] is an error because it fails entirely in not being able to explain how a small candle can project light with the same speed as the blazing sun, which has an immensely higher temperature. We have made sure by experiment that light propagates with the exact same velocity irrespective of the character of the source. Such constancy of velocity can only be explained by assuming that it is dependent solely upon the physical properties of the medium, especially its density and elasticity for allowance of force.

Nikola Tesla

Light is not an emission, it is a perturbation/vibration in the environment. Photon particles don’t exist. They are simply a measurement of each stretching/squeezing pulse of high-frequency vibrations. Just as the term “phonon” is used to measure/describe sound wave phenomena, the “photon” is a “quasiparticle”, which is to say that it is not an actual particle at all. The speed of light is like the speed of sound. There are no “sound particles” either. These are phenomena of inductance. The “speed of light” is not a universal constant because it is really a rate of induction that depends on the medium through which light waves are being transmitted.

The coaxial transverse electro-magnetic (EM) waves associated with light are posterior attributes induced by these longitudinal pressure patterns (as always, following the right-hand rule), like pistons pumping around an invisible crankshaft. This is similar to how magnetic pressure is induced around an electric conductor. Magnetism is a secondary response to / posterior attribute of dielectric forces. (More on this when we get to magnetism and electricity.)

Waves and Fields

Physicists often talk about waves and fields as if they were substantial objects. However, waves and fields are just pressure patterns. Don’t mistake the map for the territory. Pressure propagates through a medium at a rate based on its density/elasticity ratio (how “thick” it is compared to how “stretchy” it is). That is why the “speed of waves” (really just a rate of induction based on the hysteresis of the medium) is different in different environments. Sound waves propagate faster through solids than liquids or gases, for example. This is also why the rate of wave propagation changes when they emanate from one medium to another, which is how light waves can “slow down” when passing through media like water or glass and then “magically” speed up again upon exiting them without “breaking the laws of physics”.

What About the Double-Slit Experiment?

Thomas Young’s famous double-slit experiment did not demonstrate so-called “wave-particle duality”. It simply showed the constructive/desctructive interference patterns of different wavelengths of visible light. The claim that photon particles moving as waves are absorbed by the detector is a tacit admission that they aren’t particles in the first place.

Furthermore, saying that photons are “swarms of energy packets” that “carry” energy proportional to the frequency of the corresponding electromagnetic wave they are associated with is an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying that the energy measured in wave patterns is proportional to their frequency. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength and the more energy transferred per unit of time (e.g. blue light more energetic than red light).

What About the Photoelectric Effect?

Pressure in the environment can be absorbed by matter. This happens all the time with sound and light and heat, and is dependent on the nature of the pressure and matter involved. Environmental pressure can also be reflected/refracted by matter (which is how mirrors and prisms work). The photoelectric effect is really just a special case of the general principle of induction. It does not involve “massless particles” mediating a mathematically derived “field of influence” in the creation of other “massless particles”. These are all just abstractions and reifications of environmental pressures and inductance. Related phenomena such as photoconductivity, photovoltaics, and photoelectrochemistry (as well as chemistry in general, which we will get to later) are all just pressure modalities and resulting phase changes (not unlike changing ice to water to steam).

Light or Illumination?

The black is the true face of the Light, only we do not see it.

Nikola Tesla

Light is really just a concept. It doesn’t actually exist. What people call light is really the obstruction of high frequency waves by matter. In other words, what people call light and what they perceive it to do (illumination) are essentially one and the same thing. Technically, you don’t “see light”; your eyes (and by extension, your brain and mind) are illuminated.

This is similar to how you hear. There aren’t any sound particles entering your ears; your inner ear structures resonate with vibrations in the environment. The structures of the human ear cannot resonate with frequencies outside the range of about 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The structures of the human eye cannot resonate with frequencies outside the range of about 400 THz to 800 THz. Some might say that frequencies outside these ranges constitute “dark sound” or “dark light”, but as is the case with so-called “dark matter”, human senses are not capable of directly observing the great majority of what is in the universe.

(Fun thought experiment: If you could become invisible, you would be unable to see. Light cannot manifest to a truly transparent medium. You cannot absorb and reflect the same frequencies at the same time.)

Only a very small portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum is visible to humans as “light”. That larger spectrum has no arbitrary upper and lower limits. Categorical frequency bands like radio, microwave, infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma ray do not resonate in the structures of the human eye, so they are invisible to us.

How Prisms Work and Why the Sky is (Sometimes) Blue

As mentioned above, environmental pressures can be transmitted, absorbed, refracted, and reflected. (Sidenote: this is why all physical phenomena can be understood through capacitance/resistance and permeability/permittivity). This is also why the ether is “dark”/invisible to the human eye and why the sky is blue during much of the average clear day and other colors at dawn and dusk (and why the atmosphere does not hinder viewing heavenly bodies as much during the night, since there is little interference from more or less direct sunlight bombardment). Visible light waves are refracted as they move through the atmosphere, which acts as a large capacitor. This is similar to how prisms diffract/disperse white light. The glass or crystal of the prism is itself a capacitor, and the higher frequencies/shorter wavelengths of light (purple/blue end of the visible spectrum) undergo greater electromagnetic retardation/refraction passing through such a medium than do lower frequencies/longer wavelengths (red end of the visible spectrum).

(Fun fact: Rainbows appear in the sky when sunlight is refracted by raindrops like a huge prism array.)