If the best insulating windows would be

ones that had nothing in between

the two panes of glass, just a vacuum,
think about the Earth and the Sun.
Which are separated from each other by 93
million miles of vacuum.
It's kind of amazing, actually, that
the lump
of atoms here that is the Earth, the
kinetic energy
of those atoms, has anything to do with
the
energy of the atoms in the sun, or
anything
else in space.
It turns out that the way
energy can be transferred through a vacuum
is by means of light.
Light is composed of two properties of
space time.
One of them is the electric field and the
other is the magnetic field.
The electric field is manifested in
that if you take something
that has a positive charge like a
proton, an H plus atom like what
changes the acidity of water, that
has a positive charge and
then an electron is a particle that has a
negative charge and you sort
of set those things close to each other,
they will feel each other's presence.
They will want to come together
even
though there's nothing in between them
but vacuum.
The electric field is what these things
are feeling
and that is sort of a property of the
vacuum.
A property of space.
Another property is the magnetic field
I've drawn two magnets with north
and south
poles and so the south pole of one magnet
will be attracted to the north pole of
another.
And there are some differences here.
One is that in the magnetic field there's
no such thing as a magnetic monopole.
Something that only has a north or a south
charge.
Electrical fields, you do have electric
monopoles such as
the electron or the proton. But in the magnetic
field you just sort of have things where
the charges are separated from each other
like this.
The other difference
is that the magnetic

field can reach farther.

If you have 2 magnets and they're pretty
strong you can
hold them pretty far apart and you'll feel
them pulling together.
Whereas if you take a car
battery and a jumper cable, do not try
this
at home, but if you did put the one part
of the jumper cable to the plus and
the other part of the same wire took it
close to the minus, if you actually touch
it
it would be an explosion, but before you
touch it
you don't feel much attraction cause it
doesn't
make it as far in space as the
magnetic field does.
The two fields are coupled together by
the
fact that if you change the electric
field,
if you oscillate it, move it up and down,
dial it up and down, it will induce a magnetic
field.
And so this is how, for example, an
electromagnet works or an electric
motor uses this this (phenomenon).
Or if you change the magnetic field that
can induce an electric field.
And that's how, for example, a generator
works.
So if you have some power from a waterfall
or something and
you're twisting some magnets around you
can use that to generate electricity.
Light is a coupled oscillation of the
electric and the magnetic fields.
It's like the energy bounces back and
forth
between the electric to magnetic and
back again.
If you were to draw a graph of the
electric field as
a function of time or distance, either way
since it's sort of a wave,
this is a time where the electric field is
changing
and as a result this induces a strong
magnetic field.
Now here the magnetic field is collapsing
and
changing and so that induces a strong
electric field
and so the energy is sort of bouncing back
and forth between the electric and the
magnetic fields.
Now this thing sets
up a wave that's very analogous to a water

wave on the surface of water.

If this is the flat surface
of the
water and you make the water actually do
like this, there's gravity
tending to pull this water down and
tending to push that water up
and make it sort of go back to a flat
surface.
But if you do it just right there can be
motion
of the water in the wave in a sort of
circular pattern like this that creates
another wave a few seconds later that has
the same shape as the first wave.
And the point is the only way this can
work is if the speed
of the wave is right so that it can sort
of self-reproduce itself like this.
Make something that looks like it did only
just moved over a little bit in space.
So if you tried to make a water wave and
make it go 100 miles an hour it would
break.
It wouldn't work.
It wouldn't self-replicate and so it
wouldn't be a wave.
Well, light is the same way.
It has to reproduce itself.
It has to bounce the energy from the
electric field, the magnetic field, and
back again
so that it looks the same way after a
split second but just moved in space.
And that's what
sets up the speed of light, is this
requirement that it sort of ring like a
bell.
So that it self reproduces
itself.