Combining multiple arbitrarily chosen frequencies of sound makes a complicated wave, not a new sine wave. Doesn't light also do this? If I add a 650nm (reddish) wave and a 550nm (greenish) wave, I get a complicated wave. If I shine this light on a prism, presumably it would resolve into red and green, I guess because the two wavelengths have different refractive indexes. But neither of those wavelengths is going into the prism. Or are they? Does nature do some kind of Fourier transform to white (or multiple-mixed-frequency) light? Or does white/mixed light somehow retain the component frequencies?
There are a lot of questions out here that are closely related to mine, but none of them seem to ask this particular question, and none of the answers shed any...light...on the problem, perhaps only because I lack the needed physics and mathematics background.
A very closely related question, maybe even a duplicate, but asked very differently.