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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
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.
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.
imagines a static cube
Ahhh....
Well... Technically they oscillate at a certain frequency.
Is more like a feeling
electrons be vibin
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."
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.
All of the most-impactful minds in science were mocked by their contemporaries.
Think about it.
Uuuh I have to remember that one
That interview answer always seemed like a cop-out to me. You could make a comparison to gravity to explain how magnetism "just is".
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.
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
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.
Whenever any of this comes up I remember that physics professor's speech on first day of quantum mechanics that got viral:
“Nobody understands quantum mechanics. The people who came up with it don't understand it. I will do my best so that by the end of this course you don't understand it either, and so you can got out to the world and spread our ignorance.”
Or something to that effect.
The Many Worlds Interpretation must be rejected because it makes sense and we've already agreed that Quantum Mechanics is not supposed to make sense.
Well put. I will never understand how Bohr managed to persuade so many scientists to commit themselves to not making sense.
I think the trick was to establish that disagreeing with the Copenhagen Interpretation makes you one of these idiots who can't comprehend Quantum Mechanics. Idiots like... Albert Einstein? Or... Erwin Schrödinger? You know, real morons.