What Is Waving?

We’re all taught a simple story: electricity doesn’t really move as drifting electrons down a wire. The electrons creep along painfully slow. What actually moves, we’re told, is an electromagnetic wave racing near the speed of light along the conductor.

It sounds neat and tidy — until you ask the obvious follow-up:

“Okay… but what is actually waving?”

The Standard Answers

If you ask a physicist, you’ll usually get one of three replies.

1. “The field itself is waving.”
   In other words, don’t ask what the field is made of — just accept it as fundamental. But that’s not an explanation, that’s a label. It tells us nothing about what’s physically moving.

2. “It’s made of photons.”
   A photon is supposed to be the “particle of light.” But photons are defined as massless quanta of pure energy. That’s already an abstraction — an accounting trick — not a physical medium.

3. “Waves don’t need a medium. They’re self-propagating.”
   But every wave we’ve ever encountered — water waves, sound waves, Newton’s cradle — is always the motion of something. The idea of a wave without a medium is a paradox hiding in plain sight.

Newton’s Cradle vs. the Bent Pipe

In a Reddit discussion I recently sparked, people offered analogies:

• Newton’s cradle shows how momentum can transfer without bulk motion. You tap one ball, the motion jumps through the line, and the end ball swings out almost instantly. The balls in between hardly move. That’s a lot like electrical signals moving faster than electron drift.

• Water in a bent pipe shows how flow interacts with geometry. Turn a pipe at 90° and you get turbulence, pressure spikes, and losses. That’s a lot like what happens in a wire bend: reflections, heating, and even radiation. If it were only neighbor-to-neighbor momentum handoff, geometry wouldn’t matter — but in electricity, it clearly does.

The strange thing is: electricity seems to behave like both.

The Dual Identity of Motion

That paradox may not be a problem — it may be the clue.

Motion itself can appear in two guises:

• Discrete handoffs, where effects propagate without bulk flow (like Newton’s cradle).

• Continuous flow, where geometry shapes the outcome (like water in a pipe).

Electricity, light, and magnetism look contradictory because motion has a dual identity mode of existence. Sometimes it presents like discrete transfers. Other times it presents like continuous flow.

Motion as the Only Observable

This duality suggests we need to flip our worldview.

• In a matter-based view, particles are primary and motion is secondary — just what happens to them. That worldview multiplies “fundamental particles” and “exchange messengers” until we get a zoo no one can manage.

• In a motion-based view, motion is primary, and “matter” is just motion persisting in closures. That’s why even supposedly “static” things vibrate, drift, or spin. Nothing is perfectly still. If stillness doesn’t exist, then motion must be the only truly universal observable.

Fields, particles, and forces are simply the different ways motion holds together.

The Universal Medium

But motion doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Every motion requires a stage.

We may not observe this medium directly because our instruments are made of the very same closures we’re trying to probe. It’s like “measuring a unit square with a unit square.” You can’t reveal anything smaller than your tool. That’s why electrons seem pointlike and fields seem mediumless: we’re brushing against the floor of physical reality with tools that can’t go below it.

The invisibility of the medium isn’t evidence of nothingness. It’s evidence we need new observational strategies. Waves without medium are a contradiction. The effects we measure are real and physical. They must be carried by something real and physical.

The Punchline

I approached a lot of these topics in a reddit thread and saw some interesting patterns from the comments.

In the Reddit thread, after all the analogies and abstractions, the mainstream fallback came down to: “the field just is.”

That isn’t an explanation. That’s a surrender.

If motion is all there is, then there must be a universal medium for motion to exist in. Otherwise, what is it that’s moving?