This page contains some images of ideas in Physics 442 that are sometimes hard to understand. I hope you find it useful.  
 
 
 
Plane Wave .   This is a snapshot of a plane wave, but it is animated by having the snapshot unfold before your very eyes. (Is this helpful? Talk to me, people.) The red arrows are electric field vectors and the black ones are magnetic field vectors.  
 
 
Circularly Polarized Wave .   This is what the electric and magnetic field vectors look like in a circularly polarized wave. Notice that in contrast to the plane wave case, there is no place in the wave where E and B vanish. The image rotates to help you get a better feel for the 3-D nature of this wave.  
 
 
Reflection and Transmission , This is a still picture of incident, reflected, and transmitted waves. The animation is just to guide your eye as the incident wave is revealed, followed by the reflected and transmitted waves. In the end, you will be looking at a snapshot of the three waves. Notice that wave amplitude is not conserved.  
 
 
Waves in a Conductor, This is a snapshot of a plane wave again, but this time it is in a conductor. You can tell because the wave amplitude decreases with distance and also because E and B are out of phase (E is in red and B is in blue).  
 
 
Waveguide Fields This is a side view of the magnetic field of a TE₀₁ mode in a rectangular wave guide. The animation shows the wave moving to the right, but if you focus your attention on the blue section you will be able to watch how B varies with time at a fixed x-position. See if you can figure out what the electric field is doing in each cell of closed magnetic field lines.  
 
 
Electric Field of a Moving Point Charge Click here to see what happens to the nice symmetric electric field pattern of a point charge as it moves along the indicated axis at speeds approaching the speed of light. As usual, beta is v/c. Notice that the field becomes concentrated in the plane perpendicular to the direction of motion. Warning: as you look at this image you will see the electric field apparently changing in time, and if you believe the picture you will be forced to conclude that dE/dt points only along the direction of E. This is wrong for two reasons. (1) The particle is actually moving (not shown) so that dE/dt is not completely shown in the picture. (2) The apparent change in E in the picture is only for cosmetic purposes, allowing you to see what the pattern is at different particle speeds. If v were actually changing the particle would be accelerating and radiating and the picture is completely wrong. It is just supposed to be a series of stills at different values of v/c, not a time dependent animation. .