(July 5, 2025 – 11:02 PM)Millie Potts Wrote:  As a former-physics student, please do!

OKAY SCIENCE LESSON TIME for anyone who cares.

Electricity is already known not to work well at Hogwarts (you know if we solely depended on it in 1895) but I digress.

Electromagnetic waves are transvers waves of both electrical and magnetic fields operating perpendicular to one another. They are not mechanical waves like sound and do not need a medium to travel through. Solar radiation (and other EM waves) can travel through the vacuum of space where as sound doesn't because it needs the molecules of air to bounce off and vibrate through. EM can however be deterred by certain mediums (think the insulation on your microwave to keep the very dangerous microwaves in or a lead vest while getting an x-ray). They can also lose energy rather easily once they are within a medium and do not have a consistent source powering them. For example, UV rays from the sun, once they go through the atmosphere and bounce off Earth's crust, lose their potency and become infrared radiation, which feels like heat and that is how the atmosphere is warmed.

The shorter and more frequent a wave, the more powerful they are. Radio waves are large (as tall as buildings) but need something to receive them like antenna and only have a certain range, not much really bothers them! Gamma rays are the shortest, and most dangerous but they need a consistent power source or they run out of energy really quickly.

My best educated scientific-magical guess is that a lot of magic in the air, like at Hogwarts or in Hogsmeade, becomes its own medium (like our atmosphere, though potentially thicker and less stable) that interferes with waves and changes their wavelength and frequency, making them sort of useless, so that needed electromagnetic induction for the trembler coil would be unstable and unreliable!