Question: what is light made out of?

Steven Daly answered on 17 Jun 2011:

That is a great question! The simplest answer is that it is made from electricity and magnetism, isn’t that a strange thought! What I mean is that it made from an oscillating electric and magnetic field. You are probably familiar with a magnetic field, it is what you see around a magnet. Electric fields are very similar to this and are in fact related to the magnetic field by some maths – which I won’t go into here!

However, there is another perfectly good way of explaining what light is. It is made up of particles called photons. There are billions of photons in a beam of light, and they are very strange things! If you are confused about why I have said that light is two things, then don’t be. This is something that comes from Quantum Mechanics, and there is almost noone in the world who understands that! I am certainly not one of the people who do! Quantum Mechanics says that things can be waves and particles at the same time, which is just almost impossible to imagine. It even says that people qre both particles and waves!