Hey everyone. So in this video, we're going to talk about the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, the electromagnetic spectrum itself is just a continuum of electromagnetic radiation that contains all wavelengths and frequencies. Electromagnetic radiation is just the flow of light energy that is traveling at the speed of light through space as either an electric or magnetic field. It was the physicists Max Planck and Albert Einstein who theorized that this radiation was made of packets or particles. This light particle or packet was referred to as a photon and a group of them was called a quantum. As we move through the electromagnetic spectrum, as we go from left to right, we're going to be going from the radio waves all the way to gamma rays. What we need to realize here is that moving in this direction has a profound effect on our wavelength, our frequency, and also energy. So, as you're moving from left to right towards gamma rays, our wavelengths will be decreasing and our frequencies will be increasing. Remember, we talked about this in previous videos, that there is a direct relationship between frequency and energy. So here, if my frequencies are increasing, that means my energies are also increasing.
If we take a look at the electromagnetic spectrum itself, up here we have μ, which represents Hertz, which represents our frequency. And we're going to start out with our long radio waves. They have energies that are around 100 Hertz or 1 Hertz, and they can go up further as we move from left to right. On the bottom, we have λ as our symbol, which represents wavelength, traditionally in meters. So if we're taking a look here, we can see that our frequency here is 1 Hertz and our wavelength is 108 meters. You can see the wavelength is pretty huge. It's a large number; frequency is a very small number. And we're going to start out with our long radio waves to start. When we go past the long radio waves, we're going to go into our radio waves. And remember, radio waves themselves are broken up into AM and FM. If you're looking at the dial on your car for the radio, you know that you can transition from AM stations to FM stations. And remember that AM stations typically have smaller numbers, because they have smaller frequencies. FM have larger numbers usually in terms of megahertz, and that's why they're higher up. Once we pass radio waves, we go into microwave, and then after microwave, we go into infrared. Now, this portion here that's very colorful, remember, this is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can see with our own eyes without the use of instruments. This is the visible light region. So, you can see that the visible light region makes up a very small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
After the visible light spectrum, we go into UV, and after UV, we have X-rays and then finally gamma rays. Some books may talk about cosmic rays out in space, but we typically don't talk about this within chemistry, so just realize that we're just going to go to gamma rays. What can we see here? Well, this wave here represents the relationship of wavelength and frequency. We can see that initially, the distance between each wave is pretty big, there's a vast distance between them. Remember that distance represents our wavelength. You can see the wavelength starts off pretty high. And what happens as we move from left to right? You can see the wavelength is becoming more tightly packed. That's because my wavelength, the distance between crests of the waves, is decreasing, and the frequency of waves I get per amount of time is increasing, so my frequency is increasing. But you might say, Jules, there are so many different terms here with the electromagnetic spectrum. How am I supposed to remember all of them? Well, that's when we use our memory tool. So our memory tool here says that large rude Martians invented very unusual X-ray guns. So, if we take a look here at everything we highlighted, we can say large stands for long radio waves, rude stands for radio waves, Martians are microwaves, invented is for infrared, very is for our visible light spectrum, the small portion here, Unusual is for UV, X-ray is for X-rays. And then guns here are for gamma rays. So, use this memory tool to help you remember the order of the electromagnetic spectrum. And remember, as we move from long radio waves all the way to gamma rays, we see that our wavelengths are decreasing as our frequency is increasing.