One phenomenon. Sixteen orders of magnitude.
The electromagnetic spectrum is one family of waves: electric and magnetic fields rippling through spacetime, carrying energy. Radio, microwaves, infrared, light, UV, x-rays and gamma rays are all the same phenomenon. This view spans all known types of electromagnetic radiation, sixteen orders of magnitude, from radio waves that pass through you unfelt to gamma rays that can snap your molecules apart and, at the intensity of a nuclear fireball, vaporize you outright. Below, explore. Choose two signals. Compare their frequency, wavelength, photon energy, and how matter responds.
Wavelength, for scale
This view spans 10 kHz to 100 EHz — sixteen orders of magnitude of one phenomenon, not the physical beginning or end of the spectrum. Click a region to focus on it, or drag the bright window.
Click moves the marker · drag a handle · scroll or pinch to zoom · double-click a landmark to center it.
| Relationship (B vs A) |
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✦ SAME POWER, DIFFERENT PHOTONS
The formula drawer
photon energy E = hν (h = 6.626×10⁻³⁴ J·s) beam power P = photons per second × energy per photon
Frequency fixes the energy of each photon. It does not fix how many photons a source emits — that is power, and power belongs to the source, not to the spectrum.
- PHOTON ENERGY
- always increases with frequency →
- BEAM POWER
- depends on the source
- HAZARD
- depends on power, exposure, absorption, and biology
How matter commonly responds
These regimes overlap and depend on the material — they are common mechanisms, not walls. The named spectrum bands themselves are conventions with soft edges, not laws of nature.
Wave view
Speeds are compressed into a watchable range and cycle counts are mapped logarithmically — no screen or clock can literally display both ends of a sixteen-decade range at once. Waves too dense to resolve dissolve into a smear, which is the honest picture: too fast to see is a blur, not a strobe.
Who senses what
Suggested by a reader: different animals are issued different slices. Bees and birds see into the ultraviolet; pit vipers image the world in the infrared glow of their prey; your own skin senses radiant warmth far below what your eyes catch. And one correction to a common mix-up: no ear hears radio. Sound is pressure waves in air, not electromagnetic radiation — different physics that borrowed the same vocabulary.
Stories
✦ HOW FAR IS 53 OCTAVES?
This view spans 53 doublings of frequency. To feel what that means, take one walking step — 0.75 m — and double it once for every octave:
One step becomes seven-tenths of a light-year — most of the way through the comet halo at the solar system's edge, a sixth of the distance to the nearest star. Radio to gamma is the gap between a footstep and the Oort cloud, and the entire visible rainbow is a single stride somewhere along the way.
You are reading this page by catching a hail of half-quadrillion-hertz photons that left a glowing rectangle nanoseconds ago — light your eyes were built for. Of the fifty-three octaves above, you were issued one. Spend it well.