In diagrams I often see light waves depicted as little sine waves that travel through space. And often when describing polarizers, the explainer will angle their hand to show the angle of polarization and bob it up and down in a sine wave action, apparently emulating the amplitude of the wave.
My questions is, is the amplitude of light really like this? Where it moves up and down or side to side in space? Or, is the sine wave relationship just an analogy?
Answer
If the person drawing the graph bothers to label the axes you'll see that the thing that "goes up and down" is not displacement as it is in a wave on a string but electric field strength.
So, no, nothing is moving off the line of the ray, but the because electric field is a vector the oscillation does have a direction associated with it (and therefore polarization makes sense).
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