Comment on Hamster

• ulterno@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  For anyone whose magnet related memories are not filled with various line illustrations of the forces, that’s probably it.

  And even though my head is full of those illustrations, I don’t seem to understand how the iron fillings and ferrofluids make the shapes they do instead of just sticking to the magnet. And I am too lazy to do the maths to make myself understand.

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  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Except that imagining fields (not forces, if I’m thinking of the same illustrations as you) as lines is very very far from how deep it goes. Throughout physics education, most ppl go through several iterations of thinking you finally understand magnetism, then realizing you really fucking don’t, as it’s more complicated than you were taught previously.

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    • ulterno@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      imagining fields (not forces,

      Yeah that thing. Except that they were dubbed “magnetic lines of force”.

      Looking at the iron shavings though, it seemed more like low potential energy regions/ stable regions.

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    • andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It would have helped if my E&M class had been more than triple integrals and geometry.

      Idk - would it kill physics profs to graph shit in Desmos so you can visualize some of these fields? Or start with simple examples? I know how to do a partial fraction decomp, but if I’m spending all of my time on tedious algebra and then fuck up the integral in such a way that I accidentally made something that looks like what Papa Wolfram gives you when you ask him to integrate 1/(x^5 + 1) - then you don’t know if you did fuck up or not, because maybe there’s some trick or this has significance and blargggggh.

      I wanted to become a physics teacher specifically, just because I hated the way I was taught physics so much. (I hate the way chemistry is taught too, but I also hate chemistry. Unfortunately, I’ve only got to teach physics as a sort of concessionary “elective” that they tossed SPED students and the basketball star in…)

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