4 ms·
This article is pretty good. A short summary is that electricity is like a sound wave propagating thru a sea of electrons or protons or something charged. This
by frongpik 6y ago
This article is pretty good. A short summary is that electricity is like a sound wave propagating thru a sea of electrons or protons or something charged.
This is however the tip of the iceberg. The real mystery is how those electrons and protons feel each other. They don't bump into each other like atoms in the air, they interact via magnetic field - a mysterious medium that magically appears around charged particles and alters their trajectories. It's the same magnetic field that surrounds bar magnets. Rumors are magnetic field is made of photons, but nobody has been able to see or catch those photons, so they have been renamed into virtual photons. Those special photons don't really exist, but still interact with charges.
- Robotbeat 6y agoMagnetic field can be derived from electrostatic effects and special relativistic effects. That sounds complicated but both are sophomore level concepts. Sure, the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, but you don’t need that piece of (graduate-level) knowledge to understand magnetism.
- kharak 6y agoI personally absolutely need that piece of information. I have a simple assumption about the material universe. All interactions rely on touch. Atoms or their sub-particles don't magically interact with each other over a distance. That's why I still don't understand gravitation, at all. I don't care that we can calculate something. That doesn't tell me what is actually happening.
- shawnz 6y agoIn a classical sense, no interactions rely on touch and atoms only interact with each other over a distance.
- vkou 6y ago> This is however the tip of the iceberg. The real mystery is how those electrons and protons feel each other. Is it any more mysterious then how our planet 'feels' the presence of the Sun, through the gravitational force, despite being 150,000,000 kilometers away?
- awakeasleep 6y agoDo you consider the mechanism through which gravitational effects propagate mundane?
- vkou 6y agoI mean, it is a magical field that seems to surround every single observable object (and some otherwise unobservable ones) that propagates at the speed of light. On that scale of weird, magnetism is not particularly special.
- frongpik 6y agoThe two are very similar in this regard.