April 25, 2008
Does magnetism challenge the standard model?
Bruno Maddox on why it might, as far as he can tell, in DIscover:
For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care.
This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory. Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.
But as far as I can tell—and isn’t the point of science that all its bigger propositions come accompanied by this noble caveat?—he really can’t.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 04:33 PM | Permalink
Comments
This is below 3QD's usual standards. A few paragraphs about how he doesn't understand magnetism?
Posted by: anonymous | Apr 25, 2008 5:07:09 PM
The other Maddox is funnier
Posted by: D | Apr 25, 2008 5:25:08 PM
This is silly. No, physicists don't fully understand the mechanisms underlying magnetism any more than they fully understand gravity, or electricity, or the weak force. They have good quantitative descriptions, and metaphors (like how gravity involves the bending of space-time), and plenty of math. It's not like you can actually *see* what's happening or anything, as Maddox seems to think...
Posted by: Harlan | Apr 25, 2008 5:27:15 PM
Why was this posted?
Posted by: J | Apr 25, 2008 5:56:07 PM
Yeah, sorry, that article is terrible. We understand magnetism just about perfectly -- at the classical level since James Clerk Maxwell, and at the quantum level since Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomanaga figured out QED. This guy is just barking up the wrong tree.
Posted by: Sean Carroll | Apr 25, 2008 6:05:36 PM
My apologies for posting. I thought that perhaps there was something interesting in it, but hesitated and compromised with a cheeky "as far as he can tell."
Posted by: Robin | Apr 25, 2008 6:36:36 PM
I would disagree with some of the posters here and defend Robin Varghese for posting this. Of course we "understand" the basic electricity and magnetism of gross quantities of electric charge and microscopic quantities in relation to their experimentally observed effects. These are embodied in Coulomb's Law for the force between static charges, the Biot-Savart Law for the magnetic force on moving charges and of course Maxwell's Equations which unify the electric and magnetic fields and are even relativistically invariant. But all these fancy mathematical equations are nothing more than ways to express what is observed experimentally. Going further, a permanent magnet as the one illustrated can be beautifully explained within the observed macro understanding with reference to the spins of iron atoms all being lined up in the same direction and when it is made to approach an unmagnetized object, like the iron door of a refrigerator, it, by the same general principles known and observed about electricity and magnetism on a gross level, causes the spins of those atoms to line up as well thereby causing the attraction to the refrigerator door. As one of the posters mentioned, all this can even be reduced to a more fundamental level a-la-Feynman. However, in the end, what is still a mystery is the abstract concept of "action at a distance". We invent the idea of an electric field and a magnetic field filling all space around any charged object because this is a way of describing what is experimentally observed when another charge is placed in the space and the various motions and accelerations of that charge "caused" by the existence of the first. But the underlying "reason" of how these fields are microscopically or macroscopically "created" by the very existence of the charge itself or the "reality" to be ascribed to them, is still very much a mystery just as the gravitational "action at a distance" between planets or stars is still such a mystery.
In fact, one could ask, "What is an electric charge?" "What is an electron?" Etc. Perhaps we can be thankful that with some relatively simple mathematical equations and physical concepts, man is able to basically "comprehend" and "rationalize" or "summarize" some very complicated experimental phenomena. And in the end, just dismiss fancy speculations and claims of "standard models" and particles with fractional electrical charges which have never been observed and the explanations of known "particles" in terms of dozens of other mythical "elementary" "particles", with a grain of salt.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Apr 26, 2008 7:29:21 AM
Shipov, Akimov and colleagues have an explanation: proximal and distant events are linked thru 'vortices.' Charged particles excite the ground state of electrons/positrons. Where wave packets are mutually embedded, a "torsion field" is elec.'ly neutral--if opposite in spin, the system is compensated in charge and classical spin as well as magnetic moment. They designate this a 'phyton.' Conglomerates of this approximate a vacuum's torsion field--these vortices carry info. at a speed of one billion times the speed of light.
This is old news to those who have read much of Ervin Laszlo's work...
Posted by: MissVolare | Apr 26, 2008 9:41:59 AM
Sabine has done a wonderfully clear job of responding to this over at Backreaction. She talks about the real science behind the misconceptions in this piece.
Do have a look.
Posted by: Aatish | Apr 26, 2008 8:02:08 PM
Magnetism needs no explanation: some of us just have it and some of you just don't.
Posted by: aguy109 | Apr 27, 2008 4:05:12 AM
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