- #36
zoobyshoe
- 6,510
- 1,290
krab: "I cannot help feeling that it is a result of our conditioning whereby we have a real feel for mechanical effects, but none for other kinds of effects."
I think you've hit the nail on the head. That "real feel" you mention is a neurological one: our nerves and brain are able to make an extremely useful kind of sense out of mechanical forces. Not so with fields.
krab: "I also cannot help feeling that those who ask these questions need something like microscopic mechanical devices like springs and linkages."
Again: nail on the head. That is exactly what people are looking for when they ask these questions. When a person starts wondering about these things they have no other reference frame at their disposal from which to consider them. They are not at liberty, so to speak, to ask from any other standpoint: you push two repelling magnets together, your sences demand you to understand that this is a completely mechanical phenomenon. Your mind tells you: "there must be micro-springs too fine to be seen with the naked eye." or something similar.
Krab: "So, in a sense, everything is fields. It's one of the things you get used to when you learn physics. Fields just are, and they have certain properties physicists know and have measured."
Getting used to it is, I believe, dependent on a given individual acquiring enough information about fields to see that the micro-spring (or whatever) explanation just won't satisfy everything that a field can do. You have to learn a certain number of their mysterious properties before you can face the fact that fields are a thing unto themselves, that "they just are". In other words, you have to know a fair amount about how they behave in a fair amount of circumstances before you realize that "What fields are" isn't a secret that hasn't been unlocked yet in terms of micro-springs.
What fields do, is consistant and measurable, but what they are ends up not being expressible by mechanical analogy. Fields are fields.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. That "real feel" you mention is a neurological one: our nerves and brain are able to make an extremely useful kind of sense out of mechanical forces. Not so with fields.
krab: "I also cannot help feeling that those who ask these questions need something like microscopic mechanical devices like springs and linkages."
Again: nail on the head. That is exactly what people are looking for when they ask these questions. When a person starts wondering about these things they have no other reference frame at their disposal from which to consider them. They are not at liberty, so to speak, to ask from any other standpoint: you push two repelling magnets together, your sences demand you to understand that this is a completely mechanical phenomenon. Your mind tells you: "there must be micro-springs too fine to be seen with the naked eye." or something similar.
Krab: "So, in a sense, everything is fields. It's one of the things you get used to when you learn physics. Fields just are, and they have certain properties physicists know and have measured."
Getting used to it is, I believe, dependent on a given individual acquiring enough information about fields to see that the micro-spring (or whatever) explanation just won't satisfy everything that a field can do. You have to learn a certain number of their mysterious properties before you can face the fact that fields are a thing unto themselves, that "they just are". In other words, you have to know a fair amount about how they behave in a fair amount of circumstances before you realize that "What fields are" isn't a secret that hasn't been unlocked yet in terms of micro-springs.
What fields do, is consistant and measurable, but what they are ends up not being expressible by mechanical analogy. Fields are fields.
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