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It's definitely not a locational change, but it does have a direction and "intensity", which drawings often represent as if it were a distance.

The electromagnetic field is a vector field, so it points in a real direction, and that gives us polarization. So as light travels in a straight line, oscillating in intensity between the E and B fields over time, those fields do have a direction, but no distance offset from the beam path.

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This is why it’s a good habit to breathe through your nose. I swear that’s why it took me so damn long to get Covid. But now now masks and packed bars I got it once.

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The problem is that any source of low entropy energy will immediately get colonised by sophisticated organisms that that have billions of years of development over a bunch chemicals that have coalesced in a crack in rock or whatever. The origin of life was probably in very slow, unreliable, marginally-alive processes.

Those startups needed to be the only show in town to survive. They would now competing against modern organisms that have been through zillions of improvement cycles. It's like a F-18 versus a wooden stick.

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Thanks a lot for this reply. I've definitely started recognizing what you're trying to say in those other posts, that things really approach a point where you need to trust the math and coming at it the other way around fails to create an accurate understanding of things. (And that our intuitive understanding of what "stuff" is doesn't really hold water in an absolute sense).

I think I'm coming out of this with a less incorrect "mode C" mental model, at least– EM fields change over time / distance (one in the same in this case but whatever) in a cyclical way, so they're waves. We can measure how long it takes for one "wave cycle" to happen, as in the distance traveled as a point oscillates between the electo- part and the -magnetism part. ...Which is certainly still a pretty wrongheaded explanation and I really need to start learning the math of physics in my spare time.

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>The question being, we're able to describe the physical wavelength in nanometers of these waves that apparently aren't oscillating in space so much as they oscillate between electric and magnetic fields. ...how do you assign a unit of length to that?

The length is assigned to the distance it takes for the photon energy's wave to travel from one amplitude to the other and back. What that means physically *is* the phaenomena it expresses itself in, in the relevant experiments. If I was to speculate about how it's expressed as a logical principle of physical interactions, I'd say the wave is the photon's potential to bend or change direction, especially in contact with other matter (and the energy that constitutes said matter) as it travels through spacetime. But I'd also acknowledge that there's probably a reason why, even if my logic is correct, physicists would never oversimplify it like that.

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That does make more sense.

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No I don't mean to say polarity is spatial movement. Polarity is a change in the intensity of the electromagnetic field along a line over time.

However it's important to understand that photons are not localized until they interact with something. When they travel through space they don't have definite positions or momentums.

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The solution to that is to explain fields not lie about the nature of photons.