Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

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sleevedraw

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"The spikes in mine are significantly bigger, and, in my opinion, more impressive."
 
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MusicForFish

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can't really wrap my head around this stuff
This helps.

giphy (12).gif
 
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McShrimp

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I tried to make something like that for a science fair in like 3rd grade. Turns out I did not understand how magnets work, and it totally failed.
 

Rime

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Anything by eXurb1a is great. Even his unrelated science fiction books.
 
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spronk

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a wizard?
 
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MusicForFish

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pharmakos

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Some of us have issues. We actually enjoy it when our brain hurts. And what makes *everyones* brain hurt? Why, quantum mechanics of course.

Good op-ed by Sean Carroll, who os pretty good at speaking science to us newbs:

past a certain level of detail, what does it mean to "understand" something? perhaps the reason that no one is able to give good explanations about some of these things is because the basic vocabulary being used is already the maximum level of detail CAPABLE of being used to describe the phenomena?
 
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iannis

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It gets into why versus how. Engineering versus theory. That distinction gets blurred so much it's not entirely clear there is a distinction. It's what Feynman meant when he said, "that is so confusing that I'm not sure it's even a problem" about some experimental result he was confronted with.

He talked at length on the subject in one of his more recent mindscapes. Basically in the early 20th they all realized it was an open question and agreed to table it for a generation and focus on practical application.

"Practical" meaning something a,little different for a theoretical physicist.

I suspect, but do not know, they were hoping that further discoveries would answer the question indirectly. It has not yet bourne out.
 
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MusicForFish

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