Do we understand electromagnetics?

[jonourd]

jonourd,

We decide where posts go. You should also recognize that ZapperZ is a professional physicist, and knows quite well the role of creativity in science.

- Warren

I understand your point and I am not questioning ZapperZ's professional or technical authority , I am not sure why you have pointed that out. What I feel though is that imagination is fundamentally as important technically as technical understanding itself and therefore I feel strongly that this thread remains where it is and that people take into account the role imagination has to play in the development of Physics.

 

[jonourd]

I guess I'll take a stab at this: Are you suggesting that if people's creativity had led them in different directions, Maxwell's equations would look different than they do now?

Yes! And if business structures were not applies to the development of radio as they were we may have a very different understanding of radio and use of radio today.

 

[jonourd]

Simply because we have theories that can predict the outcomes of electromagnets for an extreme degree, does this really mean that we fully understand it?

In my electronics class I learned about the right hand rule. I have no problems with it and I know how to apply it. What bothers me is that we even have a right hand rule. If we lived in a mirror universe then couldn't it be a left hand rule. Why can't it work equally well in both directions? I don't think anyone can actually answer the question why, all they do is show evidence to prove that it is. I've learned to accept the fact and live with it.

But still, how can something work well in one direction but not equally well in the other?

Or is their evidence that those directions and scientific tangents have been explored, given of course the ideas of which no one knows were conceived of to be exprimented with in the first place?

 

[jonourd]

Examples are all around us, and I think you're reading far more into it than needed. If you took a textbook explaining the right hand rule and changed every place that said "right hand" to "left hand", and every place that said "left hand" to "right hand", it wouldn't work the same. The fact that the rule only works in one direction allows us to build DC motors and have them rotate in the desired direction every time. Simply because you can explain the cause of the right hand rule in great detail still doesn't negate the fact that it rotates in only one direction perpendicular to the flow of electrons through a wire. Passing the blame to something else that spins in only one direction at a subatomic level still doesn't answer my question. So then I'm just left asking, why would that only spin in one direction and not the other? It just goes on and on and on. It's as if God flipped a coin and said "I think I'll have it work this way".


And I really don't care because we made some cool toys with it. ;)

I feel I have been spoken for, thank you! But please continue and my fullest apologies for it being problematic.

 

[dst]

So you're telling me a man cannot understand an airplane unless he has seem or experienced one? How did the first airplane come into existence, then?

My point this: What can you possibly say to another human being about what an airplane 'is' other than a list of its physical characteristics, behaviors, and uses?

- Warren

I think what he means is what "stuff" a magnetic field is made of. Instead of saying "that particle has a force on it equal to x", he would want "that particle is made of cheese."

In this case, wouldn't such a field simply be a disturbance/change in energy spread over an area? Then you would get to "energy". What "stuff" is energy made of? :D

 

[Gokul43201]

And while we're on that path, what stuff is velocity made of?

 

[dst]

And while we're on that path, what stuff is velocity made of?

90% iron, 1% carbon, some polymers.

:)

 

[rewebster]

It's amazing how a simple question can stir up things----


Foundational/fundamental 'unknowns', like electromagnetism/magnetism, have been one of my favorite areas in physics (theoretical) for a long, long time. (we're talking theory here---NOT all of the applied knowledge that is and been known to be used for determinations of problems and situations).