So these animations are only showing you a quarter of the picture. It's a plot of the absolute value of the Electric field. It doesn't tell you anything about the direction of the field, nor does it show the Magnetic field.

So for the dipole, all it is is two straight wires, about a quarter wavelength long connected to a transmission line. Imagine the top connected to the center of the coax, and the bottom connected to the shield.

When a wave coming down the coax hits the antenna, it causes a current in the wires. Electrons will be pushed into the top wire and pulled out of the bottom wire. This creates a charge on the wires, negative on top, and positive on the bottom, and you can see that in the animation.

But because waves reverse, soon you'll get a reverse current and the top will become positively charged and the bottom negatively charged. This can happen billions of times a second for something like 2.4GHz wifi.

And also, current creates a magnetic field. So when current is flowing in the wires, there is a magnetic field wrapping around them. This current hits zero when the wires are fully charged, and is at it's maximum right when the wires are neutral.

So now you have Electric and Magnetic fields all swirling around each other at a constant frequency. This is you get EM radiation.

If I haven't lost you yet, you should consider going to school for electrical engineering; antenna theory is some of the most esoteric shit this side of Quantum Mechanics.

...Well, it's helpful to be reminded that EM fields aren't necessarily changing their properties over time, at least

What makes a person's immune system stronger than another? Many factors. Genes play a fundamental role, to an extent. The genetic makeup a person has may lead them to require certain nutrients or higher/lower levels of nutrients, both of which may be implicated in their propensity towards a disease. The rest is up to your environment, behaviour, lifestyle, etc.

If you are born with a genetic predisposition, that gene may not be expressed until it encounters an environmental factor that signals it (including social and familial influences, and lifestyle choices). So if the environment signals the gene - that is epigenetics.

However, this also includes the mental environment. Mental and emotional stress is one of the greatest taxes on the immune system. Sympathetic nervous system overdrive causes adrenal fatigue, which takes energy from other bodily functions (such as the immune system, digestive system, etc.) to produce cortisol. In this case, our constant experience becomes our habitual environment, which stimulates an emotion (anger, frustration, depression, etc.). Therefore, if the environment signals the gene, then to an extent a gene's expression can be influenced by the mind/emotions.

In conclusion, many things make up the strength of someone's innate immune system. Nutrition, activity, neurochemical balance, gut flora (which affects mental health), toxic habits, thought patterns, genetics, environment etc. all play an essential role. Generally, in most 'standard' individuals in first world countries, low immune system function is caused by poor health choices and mineral/vitamin deficiency. That in turn affects mental health, creating chemical imbalances in the brain, as the brain needs sufficient micronutrients to function optimally (therefore, for the other bodily systems to function optimally).

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It's certainly helpful. I have started to "get" somewhere along the way that EM waves are oscillating in 3D space and therefore the typical 2D squiggly line isn't sufficient, and that photons are somehow more like an intersecting point.

EM fields in general aren't cyclical (I would usually say 'periodic' for what you mean by that), for example consider the magnetic field surrounding a magnet; that's completely static, so it doesn't change over time, and it just gets weaker with distance from the magnet.

Electromagnetic waves are, mathematically, a lot like lots of other kinds of waves, like sound waves, or waves on the surface of water. All your need is some kind of field, that is, a property which exists at each point, and for the physics of that field to obey a particular form of equation, and waves will exist in that field. For obvious reasons, that kind of equation is called a 'wave equation'.

For sound waves, the field is air pressure. On the surface of water, it's the height of the water's surface. Those are scalar fields, that is, those properties can be described by a single number. EM is a bit different because it's a vector field with two vectors at each point in space. But ultimately, they end up looking very similar.

If you graph out air pressure on one axis and space on the other axis for a sound wave, you get a sinusoid, i.e. it looks the same as graphing y = sin x. And that's exactly what you get if you graph out just the length (i.e. magnitude) of the electric field vector (rather than worrying about the direction of the vector) along the direction the wave is travelling. Just pretend it's a scalar field like air pressure!

Graphing out the magnitude of the magnetic field is basically the same, the electric and magnetic fields vary in the same way in an EM wave, just that the electric and magnetic field vectors are at right angles to each other, and they're both also at right-angles to the direction the wave is travelling.

Anyway, for all of the above, wavelength is just the distance between adjacent peaks on the graph.

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The single electron universe model fails once you introduce other particles - a muon can decay into an electron and neutrinos. You can't represent that if there's only one electron going back and forth in time.

Thank you for your answer! You sure deserve those awards!

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Wouldn’t that imply that a significant amount of recreational stimulants such as cocaine or many cathinones (‘bath salts’) help prevent parkinson?

What about dopamine release agents such as amphetamine/methamphetamine?

It looks like you managed to tag someone with a 1-character difference from my username. I wonder what the chances of that are. Anyhow, I’m the one that supplied the assistance, not the innocent u/shikoto - please leave them out of this. I will take the punishment.

u/Grand-Tension8668

Sorry to tag you here in a response to myself like this. I can see the email that Reddit sent me when you made the comment response to my previous comment… but it doesn’t show up on any Reddit client I can find.

Anyhow, something to consider is that the fields that the waves are imposed on (there’s a lot to unpack in that statement) ABSOLUTELY DO exist in the three dimensions of space. That’s the only reason that we’re able to apply spatial dimensions to these waves in the first place. So yes. The things that are waves do exist, spatially.

That’s funky. What do I mean by that? Well… a photon is a particle. But it isn’t matter. It has no mass. It is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. The force itself. Now, electrons and protons that do have mass? They’re matter. They’re both carriers of electrical charge. Charge by itself isn’t a force.

This is all going to be over-simplifying things quite a bit, but bear with me. You need to understand at a simplified, incorrect level before you can understand at a less simplified, slightly more correct level. And that’s how it goes all the way up, since the way science works is that every scientific law or theory includes the implication that it may be wrong, and at best is a tool for providing predictions or analyzing observed data.

On one side, you have a hill of negatively charged electrons. On the other side, a hill of positive protons. In the middle, a flat plain of neutrons, with no electrical charge. The protons “want” to meet up with the electrons, just as much as the electrons “want” to pair with the protons. The power of the “wanting” on both sides is the force. That force is mediated/carried by photons.

That space between the protons and electrons is still extant, in the 3D world. The protons and electrons are both the result of excitations/waves in various different fields. The fields come before the particles, at least so far as we can tell.

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Is what I'm seeing in these animations two/eight smaller antennae arranged such that their wavefronts(?) are in phase with each other, so they amplify to create a much stronger wave with a flatter curve?

I've worked with wireless hardware of various types most of my adult life, but I've still always had that disconnect with trying to visualize a wave in 3d space; especially when looking at some of the antennae I've run across. Would it be accurate enough to say that the "waves" expand in a shell from a point of origin, and each "shell" is more or less the location of the peak field strength at the moment you're measuring it?