[jcims]

I don’t know if this will help you but it is how i think about it.

Just keep in mind that the waves you see plotted aren’t a direct physical model like you might find in the chapter about forces. In those topics you can directly represent a pully or a lever and depict force vectors and distances and their relationship within the system right on the page.

Waves drawn to represent sound or AC current or RF are confusing because they look like waves in the ocean so the brain just inserts that somehow. However, those waves are really a derived value that plots the field/pressure/current intensity over time (or distance). Imagine they are being drawn by a small plotter hooked to a sensor at some point in space and the up and down movement of the ink on the page is just the change in pressure/intensity over time at that spot.

There's an image on this page that depicts it as a 2D slice of reality - https://dosits.org/decision-makers/tutorials/science/what-is...

This is closer but the problem with this image is that the particles all have a laminar motion back and forth. The reality is that it's like quadrillions of superballs bouncing in random directions and these density fluctuations are only really evident in larger scale aggregations of particle motion.