this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Same vibes
I still feel like I don't really know how magnets work. The more I learn, the more befuddled I am. Like, I can be fine with the physics and stuff, but then I think about it too hard or too little and it's like one of those seeing eye pictures except instead of everything coming to focus, I suddenly become confused.
I think the difference is in how people interpret the question of how they work. Like you could say, easy, magnetic fields. But you can always drill down to a deeper layer. How do magnetic fields work? Well there's a force exerted on a particle moving through a magnetic field because of the electric charge. Yeah, but HOW. Well, quantum electrodynamics and virtual photons. Yeah but how do THOSE work, and why? There's a fundamental level where explanations become WHAT something does and not HOW it does it. Whether or not someone thinks we understand how magnets work depends on how deeply they've thought about the question.
Yeah, but like, everything is like that. The fact your not falling through the floor requires a similar explanation. The fact you can see requires a far more complex one
I remember a flashlight I had, where you could remove the reflector. I could see the little sunbeams coming off them, and I told my friend maybe I wanted to study light. He told me it's just photons... Which later in life I realized says nothing, but at the time totally killed my enthusiasm
Magnets make sense to me though. Maybe since I've been playing with them since i can remember - maybe I can't see or feel a magnetic field naturally, but I can feel it holding a magnet. Magnets make sense - they're weird, but they make sense.
Light doesn't... Our understanding of it is so clearly wrong, but sure let's pretend it's normal for something to be a wave that turns into a basic unit of energy when you look too closely. The universe loves inconsistency, right?
Well that just gets into how deep one thinks about the question, "how does it work?" Because the fact is we have mathematical models that describe what particles and fields are doing, but there is yet to be an answer to "how" they do it. If you're satisfied with a model describing "what" something does as an answer to "how" it works then the question ends right there.