Caption

Light travels in waves, much like the waves you find in the ocean. As a wave, light has several basic properties that describe it. One is frequency, which counts the number of waves that pass by a given point in one second. Another is wavelength, the distance from the peak of one wave to the peak of the next. These properties are closely and inversely related: The larger the frequency, the smaller the wavelength — and vice versa. A third is energy, which is similar to frequency in that the higher the frequency of the light wave, the more energy it carries.