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What have you learned recently? Which rabbit hole have you been digging into?
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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If you zoom in really hard into how “electricity” works you find it mostly has to do with electromagnetic fields.
If you zoom in on electromagnetic fields you get quantum mechanics.
If you zoom in on quantum mechanics you find a lot of disagreement, basically the best scientists today still don’t fully understand our observations.
So in essence we still don't really understand electricity.
At best you get physics that describes phenomena like vanderwaals forces describes the magnet force but they don’t explain how to phenomena exist, how those forces form.
Or i am just to stupid to understand the current scientific meta. I have always been dissatisfied with how unrevealing physics was and how much questions it never answered while getting a passing grade though.
The best scientists don’t understand the observations whatsoever. They have some theories they cobbled together to fit the observations, but pretty much no real world evidence to back up the basis of those theories (not sure if I worded that one well). Good example is dark matter. That’s not a thing we know of at all. That’s a made up idea they created to make some math work, because they absolutely cannot account for how much matter in the universe the math says we are supposed to have. In other words, the math says things like gravity just don’t work unless there is a LOT more matter in the universe than what we are able to observe (I might be wrong about the gravity example. I have not read up on this in a while.)
Gravity is becoming almost a personal vice for me, and i know i am risking to be seen as ridiculous for even saying so.
Supposedly its one if the fundamental forces, but fundamental in this context means forces not reducable to more “basic” interactions.
But we already know that gravity is caused by curvatures in spacetime. Which we believe are caused by mass.
“Spacetime” is not classified as a fundamental force.
I have personally (internally) started to use the term “gravity effect” because it fits my own model of the universe much better.
My own model of the universe is by all accounts some dumb ape bs, but as i am coming to terms with, so is most of established human knowledge.
I have real fears of one day finding myself on the side of science deniers, but a freaking love science…
Dude, you can’t lead up to a theory like that and then no payoff!
I thought electricity was just a stream of electrons flowing in one direction like a provoked stampede.
Did Bill Nye lie to me?
Yes he did. Its the holes. The holes move.
But beyond circuits I, the OC is right. It quickly gets into field theory, where electricity in wires is just a special case.
its 100% in any meaningful sense of the word move the electrons that move, but thanks to ol' benny franks we have an ass-backwards roundabout way of describing the relative motion of stationary proton "holes" compared to electrons which are- well, more teleporting than moving, frequently (if you'll pardon the pun). holes move in the same way that water pressure is analogous to voltage: there may be mathematical and maybe even some physical comparisons to be made, but the conceptual framework is fundamentally an analogy, and in the case of "hole flow" a fudged up cya excuse for not updating the damn convention when the mistake was discovered. hurrumph.
holes flowing... protons with free motion? in a solid wire or semiconductor? you mean a plasma.
is there a physical constraint one could apply to matter to cause "holes" to flow while electrons stay put?
Bill Nye was describing a direct current (DC). But most houses use alternating current. With an alternating current (AC), the electrons are jutting back and forth rapidly rather than flowing in one direction, and the rate of this depends on the Hz (frequency)!
The real world application fields convert these theories into smaller easier to understand rules that you can hold, touch, taste, and smell. A microchip groups a ton of sub micro scale components working together as a factory to produce a device that is used to make another device , etc. Each one of those sub scale components was meticulously designed to work in a certain way using well understood rules. We likely do not have the understanding of lower level quantum-ish magic that makes it work, but we do know how to build real things with our simpler rules.
No, you're pretty accurate! As a physics geek I've always joked that electricity is the closest thing we have to real life magic and all of our computers are essentially running on magitech 😂