I am very excited for you. If you were interested enough in the description to order that book I have no doubt you'll find it intriguing from cover to cover. Enjoy, and stay curious!

It is irresponsible how incorrect this explanation of physics is. Rotating a magnet does not simply create EM waves. The changing magnetic field from the rotating magnet is not the same oscillating magnetic field induced by a photon.

Photons are not simply ripples that propagate outwards from some disturbance of a field.

Let's start here:

>my math teacher told me I had no chance to ever learn the math necessary to do Physics, and it's just be a waste of my tuition money

What a horrible teacher! I don't care how hopeless it looks, a teacher should never, ever discourage our curiosities! I don't care if you were struggling with basic algebraic principles, you can learn the math necessary if you are truly curious about physics!

>everybody has told me that I just have to take a bunch of math and make sure I'm 100% on that before I ever even look at a physics book, but I just can't do it. I hate math so much).

Also not the best advice for everybody. We all have areas of strengths and natural curiosities and other things are just work. This advice amounts to "you can never play an instrument if you don't learn nusic theory and how to read sheet music." It's just not true. You should try to learn the formal rules and principles, and respect the wisdom and truth they contain, but if you love to play music and can do it without reading sheet music, then do it! This is kind of the same thing, although you can't completely disregard the math in science, whereas you can have a successful career playing music even if you never learn to read a musical note.

>I was trying to figure out what Maxwell's equations mean, and that took me to Stack Exchange, where somebody said that if we have a wave passing through the magnetic field, it induces an electrical field, and then that re-induces a magnetic field, which then self-propagates as the electrical wave makes a magnetic wave, and so on and so forth. We can this endless propagation a photon.

Oof. I don't like that explanation at all. They might have some truth in some of it, but it is safe to just ignore this explanation. Also, Maxwell's equations are very difficult to understand intuitively. I'm an electrical engineer by profession, I have an undergrad degree in that and one in business, and I am deeply interested in the physics, I should have double majored or at least minored in physics. I also may later pursue a PhD in physics, but for now my career is to be an engineer, which I do enjoy.

Maxwell's equations describe basically the totality of the electromagnetic force. It helped einstein to come up with special relativity and it also provided clues to quantum theory. These equations described the electromagnetic force better than Newton described classical mechanics. Quantum theory doesn't blow up Maxwell's equations the way quantum mechanics blow up Newtonian physics. It's amazing. But it's also not very intuitive and I have no idea how I would even go about summarizing Maxwell's equations to a lay person. So don't sweat it if you don't "understand" these equations!

Now, here's a story.

Me, an EE who graduated with a 3.3 GPA from a top 50 school, loved math in high school but didn't love science. I struggled badly with my second semester of physics in college for my business degree. Then, after graduation, I read this book because I thought it would just be good general knowledge:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691135045/physics-and-technology-for-future-presidents

This book completely changed my perspective on physics principles that I never could grasp before. You can read the entirety while ignoring some of the math he presents. It's a textbook but reads very conversationally most of the time, and is meant to be very approachable for people who aren't necessarily STEM majors.

Now, I ask you before we go farther, what exactly do you want? Do you want to just gain a better layman's understanding of physics, or are you exploring going to college or a career change?

Because how we talk about this I think depends on your goals.

That's because it is. What is your formal level of education on the topic? We have to begin with where you are correct. You seem to be confusing a magnetic field with photons themselves.

>I am correct to say that if I have a permanent magnet it will emit EM radiation all the way down?

No. Not at all. I thought that specific part was pretty clear. A magnet does not simply emit EM radiation, moving it doesn't change that either. Moving it in the vicinity of free charged particles can induce a current, but that is not the same as light either.

Light - i.e. a photon - is a quantized packet of energy. You're not just flinging around energy by waving a magnet, no matter how fast it moves.

>Could I (theoretically) detect a magnet falling into a black hole by observing the radio waves it emits, and infer that a magnet must be falling into the black hole?

No, because it isn't emitting radio waves this way.

>What happens to a black hole that's rotating if it has charge? Does it emit EM radiation? Intuitively, I think the answer is "no" because a black hole can't emit anything. So I think I'm misunderstanding things. Where am I going wrong?

You're trying to make sense of black holes before you make sense of the basic properties of the EM force. You need to slow down and try to get a better understanding of the basics before trying to understand what happens near a singularity.

>the wave analogy stop being relevant at this point?

It doesn't stop being relevant, you just have an incorrect picture of what is happening. You likely are basing this image on your intuition of waves of water.

Actually, a useful image is more like sound waves. A sound wave consists of oscillating pressure in some medium, such as air or even water. When you hear sound, do you just hear the "high" pressure peaks? Or the low pressure valleys? Or, do you hear the full range of changes over some period of time?

It's the latter.

In fact, if you were only hearing the "peaks" or the top half or the bottom half of a sound wave, you would hear something that is distorted. This is actually how sound distortion in music works, such as for guitar amps or synthesizers. When we speak, or a piano hammers a tuned string, the sound created is relatively smooth, like a sine wave (speaking has more complicated wave patterns but the patterns consist of a combination of relatively smooth waves). A distorted sound appears more like a square wave or something with more corners on it, when plotted visually. So instead of your ear sensing the smooth undulations of pressure changes, it experiences sustained pressure (such as the top of a square wave) followed by (or preceding) a much more abrupt and instantaneous change (the vertical part of a square wave). This is more jarring and unexpected, which is why it sounds "unnatural."

Vision and light share some of these characteristics of experience, in that when your eyes see, they are typically experiencing a smooth range of changes in the Electromagnetic spectrum over time as the photon passes the receptors in your eye. It's not simply the peaks or valleys of this wave, it is the frequency and the total energy ( simply: how many photons in the frequency range) that your eyes sense. You can't really experience an instant of a photon. You need the changes of the wave over time for your body and brain to sense and interpret these signals.

>In this case, the electromagnetic field

I asked which one?

>Perturbations in that field,

How does this field differ from the fields surrounding charged particles such as electrons and protons? Is this the same field? Are electrons and protons then not also "perturbations?"

If this is an explanation from quantum field theory, how does this description of one single, continuous electromagnetic field differ from the luminiferous aether? And, again, how do we understand the fields surrounding stationary or moving charged particles?

A permanent magnet is a magnetic dipole. It doesn't create "excitations," a magnetic field forms surrounding the two poles, pointing out of the north end and into the south end.

Moving a magnet doesn't typically create light because the motion doesn't typically produce a sufficient amount of energy to excite electrons and cause the excitation-decay process that occurs in, say, LEDs. Said another way, the material physics for free electrons recombining with "holes" simply doesn't exist here. Theoretically it should be possible to move a magnet with the right frequency and in the correct plane near an LED to produce a bit of light, but this would be rather difficult because the direct interaction between this magnet and the electrons in the semiconductor material would be rather weak. Obviously we can use motors to rotate magnets in an electric generator to produce electricity in cables and wires and then create useful circuits that way, but the physics of photon production a bit more complex than just moving a magnet around.

Moving a magnet can induce an electrical current in a conductive material, i.e. a copper wire. This is because the magnet interacts strongly with the free electrons in the conductive material, and the electrons move to produce a current. Photons are released most commonly when an electron "decays" energy states (it loses energy) and changes from a high energy state to a lower energy state. The frequency of light emitted depends on the energy difference between these states, known as the "band gap." Semiconductors have many different medium sized band gaps. Conductors have band gaps with actually "overlap" and cross each other, indicating little to no energy change is necessary for the electrons to change states. This is why they can move so freely in the conducting band to create current. Insulators, meanwhile, have very large band gaps and the amount of energy required for an electron to change states in an insulator often while break down the material, i.e. burn it.

When you move a magent around, you simply cause that magnetic dipole to "wiggle," but this is not a photon. A photon is a continuously oscillating electrical and magnetic field moving through spacetime, with those fields oriented perpindicular to each other. Only if you understand higher-order quantum field theory should you try to make sense of the description of a photon being an "excitation of the electromagnetic field." I don't like that description. It is not good for lay people, and I don't even know if it is agreed upon in the physics community. It is its own electromagnetic fields, and they are oscillating constantly. It's not a ripple of water propagating outwards from some disturbance losing energy as it travels, like you threw a pebble into a pool. It is a much more complicated particle and wave than that.

Edit: I want to add something else here. Some people have stated that moving around a magnet does produce light waves, but that is not necessarily true. A changing magnetic field can induce a current, but only where free electrons are present, and a current does not necessarily produce light, or at least any useful light beyond the imperceptible statistical stray photon. A photon is a "packet" of energy which exhibits the characteristics of both a particle and a wave. It is a fundamental piece or building block of energy in the universe. Moving a magnet around does not inherently induce some quantized amount of energy to be flung about the universe in the form of a photon. A moving magnetic field, in a vacuum, is not itself any form of energy, even though the movement of this magnetic field superficially is similar to the changing magnetic field of a photon. A changing magnetic field can induce a force - the electromagnetic force - on free charges, but no energy exchange takes place until electrons begin moving.

Whether the magnetic field itself uses photons - being the fundamental carrier particle for the EM force - to "communicate" with or "touch without touching" the electrons is something of a much higher level debate, to the best of my knowledge.

>excitations of a pre-existing field

What "pre-existing field" are you refering to? What sources exist to create such a field?

Gotta actually say I disagree with number 9. You have to respect people around you, and reading outloud within hearing of others is rude and weird.

Actually if you dig this then checkout Midnight Mass on Netflix.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Mass_(miniseries)

If you want to fully enjoy the reveals, do NOT read too far into that article for spoilers. This is a very good horror/thriller mini-series set in a small New England fishing town with one catholic diocese and then . . . Supernatural stuff happens.

Some very Midnight Mass vibes here! Nice!

Does "Ted" need a prequel? Jesus Christ.

I understand people's excitement for crazy sci-fi shit, but like, we still have the wheel and it's fine. As they say, don't try to reinvent it. Circles really are mathematically incredible shapes. They're just visually pretty simple.