Is more like a feeling
electrons be vibin
The middle finger is for B field. The thumb is reserved for force. The index finger is for current. 🎵
Lozenge’s Thumb Rule
And if you’re lucky it doesn’t exist at all.
deleted by creator
- Ok, so is it correct to say it has some rotation properties?
- Hahaha, oh no. Nonononono. No. Not at all correct no. However, it’s the best we’ve got so yeah that’s what we’re going with.
The trick is to accept it without thinking about it
Shut up and calculate!
It’s actually kind of liberating when you manage to do that.
It’s not true, but if you pretend it is, it allows you to do all kinds of math. Follow the rules as if the spin were real and there were real momentum and it allows you to predict things that you can test. It’s almost like looking at a really good magic trick, where you know that what you seem to be seeing isn’t possible, but the magician is manipulating things so that your brain can anticipate what’s coming next.
I recall a Richard Feynman video where the interviewer asks him to explain how magnets work.
His answer amounts to “I can’t explain that to you because if I gave you an accurate answer it would be too technical for it to make sense to you, and if I simplified it to the extent that you could understand, it would no longer be a meaningful answer.”
All of the most-impactful minds in science were mocked by their contemporaries.
Think about it.
Uuuh I have to remember that one
His point was that we don’t understand the interaction between fundamental forces enough to say, if we were to try and answer the question accurately enough.
So, in one sense ICP was right that we don’t know how magnets work. But also they were wrong that scientists be lying. They shouldn’t have been pissed.
That interview answer always seemed like a cop-out to me. You could make a comparison to gravity to explain how magnetism “just is”.
I think OP’s meme illustrates Feynman’s point very well; there comes a stage where if the number of incorrect statements in your explanation outnumber the the correct ones, it’s no longer a meaningful explanation.
It’s been a while since I watched it, so judge for yourself.
A lot of Feynman quotes are ultimately just witty cop-outs IMO.
I guess they are, there’s for sure something to that, but at the same time these quantum or relativistic phenomena really can’t be described accurately in simple words
It’s certainly unintuitive, but that makes sense; our intuition is formed from our experiences, and we have no experience with the domains that relativity and Quantum mechanics apply to.
Title-Text: “Of these four forces, there’s one we don’t really understand.” “Is it the weak force or the strong–” “It’s gravity.”
To me, there’s two ways you could interpret that, one is what are the effects of magnetism which we learn on high school physics, the other other is why does magnetism have those effects which is more something you’d learn in an undergraduate physics or chemistry degree.
The answer to why they have those effects would grant you a Nobel prize.
I expect Feynman’s answer, if he had a whiteboard and unlimited time, would’ve been to dive into Maxwell’s equations.
With that in mind, his answer makes complete sense. Good luck explaining coupled PDEs to people who aren’t mathy in a few sentences without visual aid. The analogy to the gravitational force isn’t on point; there’s a lot more to be said about how magnets tie to into E&M more broadly, compared to gravity.
Though you’re absolutely right that once you get deep enough into any topic in physics that the answer to “why?” inevitably becomes “it just be like that”.
The analogy to the gravitational force isn’t on point; there’s a lot more to be said about how magnets tie to into E&M more broadly, compared to gravity.
Yeah, a proper answer would need to dive into how it relates to electricity for sure
Imagine a mathematical concept that approximates a particle across a spherical plane. Now imagine a force emitted from this sphere in a field. Okay, we’re ready to talk about why this is wrong, too.
There’s no analogy for any of this that doesn’t have some flaw.
All analogies have flaws. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be an analogy, they would be describing the very thing itself.
One of my favourite things is the one-paragraph short story “On Exactitude in Science”:
On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.
" …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."
Source: https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf
Imagine trying to maintain a map of any size complexity physically! Yet another underrated way digitize technology has been a paradigm change
Something something map territory
That’s like your opinion, nerd
…spin ties the room together, man…
How about:
“Imagine you have ADHD, but you’re forced to sit in place.”
Would that work?
No.
I think it’s like the magnetic charge of the thing?
Particle spin and charge are different properties
Nope, distinct property. I don’t think there’s any good analogy really (that I’ve heard).
Ah yes the spin
Sounds like a class with an attribute called spin.
The universe is a digital simulation confirmed
The memory required to track all these particles was insane, so we just made a wave of where they were most likely to be and picked a random spot when the exact location was needed. 🤷
there’s lots of physics that cannot be described in algorithmic terms, and (as best I misunderstand it) quantum is the most that
QM is entirely algorithmic, it just operates on values that are of type “Probability Distribution”
sure, if you say so
Are you implying that’s wrong or you just don’t know
i’m just kinda skeptical of suggesting we live in a computer simulation
tens of thousands of years ago, people looked up into the night sky or a raging tempest and projected human-like traits onto it.
Now instead of seeing an angry father figure in the stars, we’re surrounded by computers so we look up (or down, in quantum cases), and see a desktop environment. It’s… awful convenient.
I wasn’t suggesting that, I just meant that a theory can be algorithmic while working with probability distributions rather than deterministic values.
It does however also have repercussions that are inline with it being a sphere that is spinning.
Didn’t it say it wasn’t spinning?
Also I love your handle.
More like its so small the idea of spin doesn’t really mean anything.
Thank you!
And yes you are correct, as it exists as a probability wave and has not finite size, it is not spinning. It does however have intrinsic angular momentum as seen in effects like Hydrogen Fine Structure, that behave exactly as though it were a ball spinning, with a set specific angular momentum. But don’t worry, the confusion is alleviated when you learn that it very definitely isn’t a ball spinning as it doesn’t have a singular spin but rather a super position of possible spin states. You can think of it like, for example, three parts spinning clockwise and one part spinning counter-clockwise.
It usually around this point that I am reminded that the universe does not owe my puny monkey brain a lick of sense.
I read an article that was arguing that the universe could be unknowable to our brains. That was real depressing
There was great episode on PBS space time about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWlk1gLkF2Y
In short it doesn’t rotate, it just has magnetic field that behaves as if the source was spinning charge
Imagine a woman in hot pants with thighs like a Robert Crumb dream woman.
I don’t know if it helps with this problem though.
NoU Imagine a cactus eating a deer.
That’s a challenging wank.
(RIP Sean Lock)
Yeah, “spin” was a stupid thing to call it. We have a nice, hard definition of what “spin” is on a macro scale. Why take a complex property of matter that we don’t have a name for, and give it the same name as a fairly common, easy-to-understand phenomenon? Extraordinarily smart people being idiots, honestly.
