Walking Is an Electromagnetic Wave
I dropped physics in my second year of university because Maxwell’s equations didn’t make sense to me.
Four equations. Curls and divergences. Electric fields and magnetic fields dancing together to create light. Everyone said it was beautiful. I couldn’t see it.
Last night, thinking about walking, I finally got it.
What Divergence and Curl Actually Mean
Before we get to the good stuff, two concepts:
Divergence asks: “Does stuff spread out from this point, or gather into it?”
Think of a sprinkler — water radiates outward from the center. That’s positive divergence. A drain is the opposite — water gathers inward. Negative divergence. If water just flows past a point without accumulating or depleting, that’s zero divergence.
In your body: an exhale is positive divergence. Your breath spreads out from your center into the world. An inhale is negative divergence. You’re gathering air into yourself.
Curl asks: “Does stuff swirl around this point?”
Think of a whirlpool, a tornado, stirring tea. There’s rotation around an axis. If things are just flowing straight without spinning, that’s zero curl.
In your body: when you rotate your dan tian (your lower belly, your center of mass), that’s curl. The energy isn’t spreading out or gathering in — it’s swirling around your vertical axis.
How Walking Works
When you walk, you’re doing two things at once that are perpendicular to each other.
Your spine twists — a rotation around your vertical axis, winding and unwinding with each step. That’s one oscillation.
Your legs swing forward and back like pendulums from the hip. That’s an oscillation perpendicular to the first one.
And these two oscillations are different in kind, not just direction.
Your leg swing is directional. The force has a clear “from” and “to” — you push backward against the ground, and the reaction pushes you forward. If you walk backward, the force reverses. There’s a line of action with two distinct ends.
Your spine twist is rotational. It doesn’t know forward from backward. Whether you’re walking forward or backward, the twist pattern is the same — just winding and unwinding around the vertical axis. It only knows clockwise vs counterclockwise, not “toward” or “away.” There’s no source point, no line from here to there. Just circulation.
Neither oscillation alone gets you anywhere. Pure twisting just… twists. You’d rotate in place with no preferred direction. Pure leg-swinging without the spinal rotation would be stiff, robotic — a goose-step.
But together — one directional, one rotational, perpendicular to each other — they create forward motion. The coupling of the two defines which way is forward.
Why Perpendicular Matters: The Goose-Step Test
Here’s a question: why can’t you just goose-step efficiently?
In a goose-step, you’re still doing two oscillations — your hip flexes, your ankle pushes off. But they’re in the same plane. Both are forward-back motions. No twist.
And it’s exhausting. You have to muscularly power every single movement. There’s no bounce, no self-sustaining rhythm.
The difference is where the energy lives between beats.
When your spine twists, it stores energy in elastic tissue — fascia, the thoracolumbar complex, the whole tensegrity of your torso. You wind it one direction, and it wants to unwind. The energy lives in the tissue, waiting to be released. Then the unwind powers the next phase, which winds it the other way.
Ankle flexion and hip flexion don’t have the same elastic reservoir. The muscles fire, the limb moves, the energy dissipates. You have to re-inject effort every cycle.
The perpendicular coupling — twist storing energy that releases into swing, swing setting up the next twist — is what makes walking self-sustaining. The two oscillations are each other’s springs.
How Light Works
An electromagnetic wave is the same pattern.
The electric field oscillates up and down. The magnetic field oscillates left and right. The two oscillations are perpendicular to each other.
And just like legs and spine, E and B are different in kind, not just direction.
The electric field is polar — it has a real direction with two distinct ends: where force comes from, where it goes. Think of static electricity. Rub a balloon on your head, build up charge, and your hair stands on end — each strand pointing away from your scalp along straight lines radiating outward. The force has a source point (the charge) and a direction (outward). You can have a single positive charge sitting there by itself, field lines streaming out in all directions. That’s a monopole — one pole, alone.
The magnetic field is axial — it’s really about circulation, handedness. Try to make a magnet with just a north pole. You can’t. Cut a bar magnet in half — you don’t get a north piece and a south piece. You get two smaller magnets, each with both poles. The field always loops: out of north, curves around, back into south. No start, no end. Pure circulation. It knows clockwise from counterclockwise, but not “toward” from “away.” Under a mirror reflection, B flips differently than E — it’s a pseudovector.
Neither field alone defines the direction of propagation. E oscillating by itself doesn’t “go” anywhere. B oscillating by itself doesn’t either.
But together — one polar, one axial, perpendicular to each other — they create directed motion. The direction the wave travels is given by E × B, the cross product of the two. Their coupling defines which way is forward.
And just like walking, the perpendicularity isn’t just geometric — it’s about energy storage.
Energy sloshes back and forth between the electric field and the magnetic field. At one moment, all the wave’s energy is stored in E (like the wound-up spine). A quarter cycle later, it’s all in B (like the swing at full extension). The fields ARE the springs. Each one stores energy and releases it into the other.
This works because of how curl operates. Curl is inherently perpendicular — it takes a field pointing one direction and creates rotation around an axis orthogonal to it. That’s what Maxwell’s equations say: a changing E creates a curling B. A changing B creates a curling E. They bootstrap each other.
Parallel oscillations can’t do this. There’s no mechanism for energy to flow between them. Each would need to be separately powered, like the goose-stepper’s muscles firing every beat.
Perpendicular oscillations — one polar, one axial — can curl into each other. Energy flows back and forth. Self-sustaining.
You Don’t Need a Floor (If You Have Perpendicular Springs)
To start walking, you need a floor. You push off, the floor pushes back, you accelerate. To emit light, you need a charge to wiggle. The charge recoils, the wave launches. In both cases, the initial push requires something to push against.
But once you’re cruising — once you’ve reached your walking speed, once the wave is propagating at the speed of light — you don’t need the floor anymore. You’re riding the dance.
Imagine walking off a plank into space and just… continuing the walking motion. Your spine still twists, your legs still swing. You have the momentum from the push-off, and the elastic dance just continues, self-sustaining. The twist-swing coupling doesn’t need ground contact to keep cycling.
Now imagine goose-stepping off that plank. Your legs pump, but there’s no spring reloading them. In a few cycles, you’d exhaust yourself and your limbs would go still.
That’s the difference perpendicular coupling makes. The goose-stepper’s parallel oscillations dissipate. The walker’s perpendicular oscillations sustain.
Light does what good walking does. The E-B dance propagates forward forever, each field pulling the other along, no medium required. Not because light is magic, but because perpendicular elastic coupling is self-sustaining and parallel isn’t.
The Body Already Knows
Maxwell wrote down four equations in 1865. They’re correct. They’re beautiful, if you can read them. Most people can’t.
But your body has been solving these equations every time you walk. Two perpendicular oscillations, elastically coupled, propagating forward through space.
You are a walking light wave.
The math is just a shadow of what your body already understands.