“When waves converge, their voices don’t compete—they compose.”
Every point in space is bathed in electromagnetic chatter—radio waves, Wi‑Fi, the cosmic microwave background, starlight and sunlight glinting off one’s lover’s face or a passing car’s headlights. Yet through all these flashing distractions we detect only those photons to which we are atuned and whose paths happen to be aimed straight at us. It’s as if at every location throughout all of space there sits an infallible postmaster—never mis‑sorting a single quantum, sending each along its destined course.
Because all radiation is electromagnetic, every electron in this intervening space is driven to oscillate—up, down and sideways—echoing all the distracting signals at every frequency and phase. But only a coherent superposition of this secondary radiation emitted from these myriad electrons is passed on as what we finally observe. The others go where they belong. Oblivious, to these inner workings of reality, we attribute our observations to the events that occurred on the far side of all that lies between.
These fundamentals of forward scattering that are essential to all observation are based on the Ewald–Oseen extinction effect.
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