What is the phemonemon behind electromagnetic waves being able to propagate in the vacuum? 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
 A: Many concepts in modern physics boil down to looking at something that worked in classical physics, and realizing that apparently crucial features are not really as important as they appeared at first glance.
Your description of the propagation of electromagnetic fields is spot on. While it's very counterintuitive for us to imagine a wave propagating without a medium, in fact it turns out that there is no need for particles to move for a wave to exist. The crucial feature of a wave (in our current understanding) is that energy is transported from one region of spacetime to another. Maxwell's equations allow propagating disturbances in the electromagnetic field to carry energy.
The trick is that these disturbances do not imply the movement of any particle and there is no rest frame for a medium in which the waves propagate. But it turns out this is just extra baggage that our common experience causes us to expect, but which is not really necessary. If you look at the equations (Maxwell's equations) defining the laws of motion for the electric and magnetic fields, you can show that the electric and magnetic fields obey a wave equation (ie -- the same equation obeyed by small ripples on a pond, or waves on a string). This equation has exactly the same form in any reference frame. The modern point of view is to take these governing equations as the definition of a wave -- even though this is an abstraction from our common sense intuition that waves should involve a disturbance in a medium.
