Question: What are the different types of electromagnetism?

James Gilbert answered on 17 Jun 2015:

Hi Lucy,

Well, electromagnetism is the name given to the underlying behaviour of things with an electric charge and how they produce forces between each other. But this simple behaviour is really useful!

You could think of electromagnetism as having two main ‘types’:

You could say that objects such as electromagnets, and machines like motors (which are made using electromagnets), have *static* electromagnetism. Here we are making use of certain materials with electromagnetic properties.

The other important category of electromagnetism is electromagnetic *radiation*, which is when electromagnetic energy is emitted by an object and travels through the air (or through space) as a wave, or what we call a ‘photon’. Depending on how much energy these waves have, they appear differently.. radio waves and visible light are all electromagnetic waves: we use radio here on earth for communicating (mobile phones for example), but the light coming form the sun and from stars in space is also electromagnetic radiation. We can analyse this to learn more about what produced the radiation in the first place.

So there are two very different ways to think of electromagnetism, but they all come from the same basic behaviour of tiny particles. Neat, eh?