I'm recently picking up interest about some aspects of physics, I never really studied physics apart from some basics and I'm having trouble finding a good course explaining the theorical approach without diving into maths (too much).
I'm interested in understanding how does electromagnetic waves work and was wondering what makes them propagate. I'm so used to mechanical waves needing a material to propagate that I'm having a hard time grasping that it's doable in a void.
From what I understood, for an electromagnetic wave to appear we need some energy exciting the electronic cloud of an atom to make its electric field "flickers" and thus creating a magnetic field, which will "disturb" the electric field, which will "disturb" the magnetic field and back and forth...
Do I have this right so far ? And if yes are those disturbances what we call electromagnetic waves and are traveling at speed of light ? I just can't grasp how a field can propagate so fast and so far