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There is a story of a student taking an oral exam at Oxford or Cambridge many many years ago. Examiner: "What is electricity?" Student: "Oh, I do know, I mean
by erehweb 2y ago
There is a story of a student taking an oral exam at Oxford or Cambridge many many years ago.
Examiner: "What is electricity?"
Student: "Oh, I do know, I mean I used to know, but now I've forgotten."
Examiner: "How very unfortunate. In the whole of history only two people have known what electricity is - the Creator and yourself. And now one of the two has forgotten."
- dmos62 2y agoI've heard it said that we don't know what electricity is or how it works. To what extent or in what sense is that true?
- CamperBob2 2y agoThat goes along with the other old saying, "All models are false, but some models are useful." We don't know what electricity is in the sense that if you keep asking "But why does object X cause (or experience) effect Y?", you will eventually reach a point where we don't know the answer. In that sense, we don't know what anything is. But we can still use it. And because everything we learn seems to become useful sooner or later, it doesn't pay to stop asking.
- JALTU 2y agoI'm not sure that was the point of the poster's question about electricity, because I've heard the same assertion made by science writers and such. Our current BFF, ChatGPT, says the question is about "charge" in that we don't know why particles have a charge. So what is a "charge" and why? Gravity is also presented as a thing we don't fundamentally (ontologically) know about. Interesting! And not disagreeing with the desire to keep asking, nor with the desire to find a final answer. The author of the article puts it fairly well: We don’t have philosophically satisfying insights into the universe at subatomic scales...there’s no straightforward explanation of what a bound electron actually does: it’s not orbiting the nucleus or spinning around its own axis in any conventional sense. Most simply, it just exists as a particular distribution of an electrostatic field in space.
- tim333 2y agoIt depends how deep you go. I mean it's the force between charged particles and their movements but if you go too deep into how did the laws of physics get there and what are electrons made of you get stuck.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoWhy is there anything at all? If we were ever to actually work that out, you can be sure it would all disappear and immediately be replaced with something even more comprehensive.
- tim333 2y agoI've got a theory it's all maths and is there in the same way that two plus two equals four, because it has to. Not that it gets you anywhere really.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoSo the answer to why is there anything at all? is: It wasn't a choice.
- tim333 2y agoI guess kinda.
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- veunes 2y agoIt's funny how the deeper you go into the subject, the more you realize that even the best explanations are just increasingly refined approximations
- littlekey 2y agoThat reminds me of my introduction to linguistics class, where I promptly learned that no one knows what a word is.