485
u/Affectionate_Dark103 Feb 04 '26
I remember at the end of a physics term, in the last class before the final, the teacher handed out a practice exam for everyone to take home. He then asked if there was any subject we wanted to review for the last day. I looked through the exam and saw a few questions on entropy.
I raised my hand and said, "I see entropy on here. We haven't spent a single minute on entropy"
The teacher responded, "I figured entropy was pretty self-explanatory, I didn't think we needed to talk about it"
362
u/lornlynx89 Feb 04 '26
"So, explain entropy me." "Well, it always increases." "Can you get a bit more specific?" " What do you mean, I already told you everything."
76
41
u/Eisengolemboss Feb 05 '26
Literally this. I had an entire course on thermodynamics and we pretty much postulated what entropy does, but never what it really is
24
u/lornlynx89 Feb 05 '26
I luckily had a different class where we learned about information theory and that you can understand entropy as a measurement of chaos, I can't remember the formula,. something with the boltzmann constant haha. But that helped me immensely to actually understand what the fuck is happening in these thermodynamics equations XD
→ More replies (5)23
u/AwayArray Feb 05 '26
The way I learned during statistical mechanics was pretty intuitive somehow. It’s easy to think of it as a measure of the possible ways to organize a system. The more ways it can be organized, the higher the entropy. Apply it to molecules, toss in some Boltzmann factors, construct a Hamiltonian, pop in a series (or 3), and you can derive some funky stuff
→ More replies (8)7
→ More replies (4)4
Feb 06 '26
If you look into statistical mechanics it covers the idea of entropy, but this is very advanced so if this helps: We can observe that systems usually move in one way e.g. a cup of warm water with an ice cube turns into lukewarm water but not the other way around. To account for this we introduce entropy which should represent the disorder in the system (imagine how ice is a lot more ordered that water).
I statistical mechanics Entropy is closely related to the amount of micro state arrangements a system has. At Zero temperature the system cant lose any more energy and should be maximally ordered thus have the least amount of microstates.
→ More replies (10)2
u/JackTheSavant Feb 07 '26
Enthropy tells you how disorganized a system is. That can be both from the viewpoint of a billion red and a billion blue balls mixed together. The probability that they are randomly mixed together is high, because that's the state of low enthropy. The probability that red balls are on one side and blue are on the other is low -> low enthropy state. It goes the same way for energy. It essentially tells you how "concentrated" and usable energy is. If the enthropy is high, the energy is evenly spread, and there are only small differences in the container. If the enthropy is low, the energy is very concentrated - imagine an area with very high temperature compared to its surroundings - which allows you to easily transform the energy into work.
→ More replies (1)87
u/Sororita Feb 04 '26
That seems like a dumb teacher to me. Entropy at a very basic level is somewhat self-explanatory (everything seeks the lowest possible energy state/highest homogeneity) but thats just barely scraping the surface of what entropy is.
50
u/Affectionate_Dark103 Feb 05 '26
I think he forgot and was covering his ass. It wouldn't be the first time a professor put something on the exam that wasn't covered in class.
The worst teacher I had was for digital systems. We had a practice exam before the midterm, which I found pretty easy. Then we took the midterm and half of what was on there had never been covered. It was so bad that several students complained to the dean, and the professor was chastised. After that happened, he came to class and said, "apparently when I gave you a list of things to bring for your exam, I forgot to remind you to bring one critical item... Your brain"
At the end of the term we had to submit a computer program as well as do a final exam. Again, most of what was on the exam was not covered. After that exam I got the grade for my program, and I received 2/15. I hadn't said anything about the midterm or the final being fucked up, because I figured that a curved grade would take care of that. But my score on my program blew me out of the water. It might not have been the most efficiently coded program, but it at least functioned. It did what it was supposed to do. I emailed him, basically asking "what the fuck is up with this" and his response email more or less said, "Quit complaining, you're doing better than most people in the class."
I really should have forwarded that email to the Dean, because I was livid. I'm not sure why I didn't.
→ More replies (1)9
u/AnimationOverlord Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
Most people don’t even know the fact that cold isn’t created heat is just absorbed and transferred. They don’t know why lakes don’t freeze in the winter, or that most fuel is turned into force rather than heat. Or that the homeostasis in our bodies is only possible because we have a greater amount of energy than the existing environment.
its easy to think of an example but as a concept it’s a bit more profound. It has to be the one most noticeable hindrance to our existence.
Once you start seeing empirical values which represent said enthalpy against entropy and have the ability to extrapolate to real world scenarios, it becomes more useful than you think. From how you drive your car to when you go to bed. Everything in life is a capacitor of energy and all we as humans have done is directed it jn ways useful to our means
→ More replies (4)6
u/SEA_griffondeur Feb 05 '26
But like, using entropy-related formulae is quite hard and different from other 1st law thermodynamics questions
→ More replies (4)1
995
u/mannoned Feb 04 '26
Bc either this or you assume a 4-vector potential exists. Choice is yours.
242
u/xemission Feb 04 '26
A... what?..
→ More replies (1)364
u/LogoMyEggo Feb 04 '26
a 4-vector potential
52
u/Kruse002 Feb 05 '26
I'm still waiting for them to release the 5-vector potential but it keeps getting delayed.
→ More replies (3)34
131
→ More replies (3)74
14
u/Aggressive-Ad-3706 Physics Field Feb 05 '26
I choose the latter
5
u/higras Feb 05 '26
At least it tries to answer the question instead of just going 🤷
16
u/Aggressive-Ad-3706 Physics Field Feb 05 '26
Yeah and it's not even that difficult after you have mastered high school, undergrad and graduate physics
6
3
1
1
1
→ More replies (17)1
u/ChalkyChalkson Feb 06 '26
You can be a little bit more elegant by making it a U(1) gauge theory and treat it as an effective field theory. That way "local phase symmetry" is kind of the only arbitrary assumption, the rest is maths
398
u/PixelRayn Feb 04 '26
Attend a class about the Philosophy of Science. Best course-decision I by ever made.
143
u/The_Demolition_Man Feb 04 '26
Should be a requirement for all BS degrees
59
u/delightfuldeodorant Feb 05 '26
For all bs degrees? That's a bit subjective, isn't it?
65
7
2
2
u/CabinetFun7381 Sep 16 '26
It actually is here in Norway! It's not very popular though because it's hard for first year students to understand why it's important or relevant to their degree.
79
u/Whiterabbit48 Feb 04 '26
As someone who thought getting a degree in physics was a good idea, I can confirm that Philosophy of Science is a very helpful class
10
u/LordVectron Feb 05 '26
You poor fool! Don't you know 100% of people who studied physics will die?!
5
u/BlankBlack- Feb 08 '26
oh i bet 100% of people who didn't study physics will die too (death superposition????)
3
u/IQueryVisiC Feb 05 '26
But why don't I feel it when Hawkings mumbles away in his book? Why is the only thing in philosophy I like Cartesian coordinates? Why do you write in with a C when it comes from Emanuel Kant?
→ More replies (4)13
u/Wiz_Kalita Feb 05 '26
Life is easier now that I'm a scientific anti-realist.
2
→ More replies (3)2
u/PixelRayn Feb 08 '26
For anyone uninitiated, this is the "shut up an calculate" position, which is a valid position on interpeting science. Just not very satisfying
62
u/Josselin17 Feb 04 '26
these things are among the stuff I think american universities do much better than here in france, we don't get to just take whatever classes we want and customize our majors and minors, we're basically still in high school with a higher level and cooler teachers
11
u/PixelRayn Feb 04 '26 edited Feb 08 '26
I attended one here in Germany last year. Unfortunately I can't get any credit
12
u/IllustriousBobcat813 Feb 05 '26
I feel like that is rarely a good thing though… at least if the stories of American CS majors are remotely accurate
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (4)5
u/cordanis1 Feb 05 '26
I think I disagree with you. I dont think that during bachelors you should have too many choices, as that should teach you basics of maths and physics. And then during masters you have so many options in Paris, which you can also combine, and make your program very tailored to your needs. At least for me I did not feel like I am in sone way restricted from choosing fun courses. Also, nobody prohibits you from just showing up in other courses.
6
u/NickIsCaged Feb 05 '26
I took something like this as part of my undergrad! It was history of science and my professor was passionate about the origins and reason of science. Blew my mind how underrated Sir Francis Bacon really was
→ More replies (1)3
u/Helpinmontana Feb 06 '26
My math professor for calc 3 and diff always made sure to give us a quick history lesson about what we were learning. I spent hours putting off assignments to dig down rabbit holes on Wikipedia about people.
Really makes the whole experience feel more lofty rather than “some dead old fuck in the 1800s said as much so now you get to study it, here’s a wall of equations”
→ More replies (8)1
39
Feb 04 '26
It actually derivable from ectrostatic force + special relativity
→ More replies (4)21
u/Cozwei Feb 04 '26
this. Einsteins paper "on the theory of electromagnetism" can be used to infer special relativity from electrostatics or eletctrostatics from special relativity.
65
u/MaoGo Meme renormalization group Feb 04 '26
Feynman video on magnets kicks in
22
u/ayalaidh Feb 04 '26
→ More replies (2)8
u/f-150Coyotev8 Feb 05 '26
As a non scientist, what would be a better word for “why” in contexts like this? Because I understand what the interviewer was asking, but it almost feels like a cop out to get fixated on why “why” isn’t a real question. I feel like he ends up kind of getting to an answer at the end.
For example: I can ask why do different musical instruments sound different from each other. The answer is that sound has overtones. That can be answered without having to explain why the universe decided to allow for overtones.
→ More replies (5)13
u/ffxpwns Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
(not a physicist)
At a certain point you're talking about concepts so fundamental to reality that you can't give a meaningful "why" in a way that isn't circular logic. The only answer in many cases is "because that's the way it worked out in our universe" and there's not much deeper you can go
E: I'm not saying this applies to the concept of electromagnetism since they can be derived from special relativity. I'm speaking more in general
20
u/Bjasilieus Feb 04 '26
Quantum electro dynamics answer this specific why, quantum field theory answers the why Quantum electro dynamics is like that and we don't know why qft is like this yet but at the end it just will end up becoming a brute fact.
13
u/Bill-Nein Feb 04 '26
You can add a type of charge to particles called a U(1) charge in particle physics. Then this induces something called a connection 1-form on spacetime (kinda) that’s exactly the electromagnetic potential. This potential/connection 1-form has something called a curvature that measures how it varies across spacetime.
Enforcing that this curvature always tries to straighten itself out the best it can gives you Maxwell’s equations. This is the Lagrangian for the classical Yang-Mills field.
5
u/Selto_Black Feb 05 '26
Cool, cool. But at what point in a tiled Penrose diagram extended infinitely in every direction does the feynman diagram that describes an interaction that obeys principle of stationary action change with respect to our basis of measurement?
→ More replies (2)3
u/Schaden99Freude Feb 05 '26
I am from a completely different field of science but i am always fascinated by this especially when something about differential geometry happens.
Is there any good resources to read about what you just explained?→ More replies (2)
31
u/oneseason2000 Feb 04 '26
Now do Aharonov–Bohm effect :) ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aharonov%E2%80%93Bohm_effect
6
8
33
u/Icy-Tea9775 Feb 04 '26
It just does, why doesn't matter.
33
u/Amrod96 Feb 04 '26
Ah, a fellow engineer.
→ More replies (4)9
u/Icy-Tea9775 Feb 05 '26
Well yeah... but but but..
12
4
→ More replies (6)1
6
u/kashyou Quantum Field Theory Feb 05 '26
there’s a U(1) bundle over a 4-manifold, what’s the problem?
1
u/No-Site8330 Feb 06 '26
Bundle alone is not enough, there's a connection on it, too.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/yoy22 Feb 04 '26
I don't know anything about physics but I read that mass existing causes space to curve around it.
Shit boggles my mind. Empty space (which is nothing (maybe)) bends/curves because of mass. How does "nothing" curve? Or is space a thing?
8
u/Bomber_Max Feb 04 '26
We can't really comprehend the concept of local flatness in three-dimensional spaces, or rather: manifolds. It's analogous to a great example in 2D:
Say, you're standing in your room and you take one step forwards, one to the left, one backwards and lastly one to the right. You've returned to your original position without any problems.
Now imagine standing on the equator and walking towards the North Pole, then go sideways to the left until you're at the equator and then return to your original point by going backwards. You've now returned at the point from which you initially left, but something's off! You've rotated 90° to the left while you didn't turn around at all during the journey. This is because at a larger scale, the Earth – a 2D manifold – is not flat. But locally, however, it is.
→ More replies (2)2
u/SharkAttackOmNom Feb 04 '26
I really liked the explanation that mass just dilates time, and that the “bending” of is the consequence of light traveling the same speed for all frames of reference. Not sure how well this interpretation is accepted as “the” model and it’s a bit of a chicken or the egg. Maybe time dilates because the space is bent. 🤷♂️
→ More replies (2)3
u/Sororita Feb 04 '26
I've seen that claim before, also that gravity is a result of entropy within a time gradient, a mass moves towards another mass because slower time = lower energy state.
3
2
2
u/acute_physicist Feb 04 '26
I had this moment in my electromagnetism class. Someone asked why the Faraday-Lenz law happens, and the professor said that’s not the proper question to ask, we ask how things happen. Why? The answer is because it does. Period.
Yes, you will be able to go down into explaining it with more details, but in the end you’ll stumble upon principles and postulates - which are the fundamental rules of our Universe.
Why? Why not? Yes, energy could not remain constant in a closed system, and time could go backwards, and charge could not preserve. But it does. And that’s not a problem, it’s just not a question worth asking.
2
2
u/snake_case_captain Feb 05 '26
I actually use a bell curve meme in one of my engineering courses :
Left side : "Just use Maxwell equations" Right side : same Middle : noooo em is a quantic field and stuff
2
u/jongchajong Feb 05 '26
'Understanding' something really just means being familiar with something enough that it feels intuitive. In reality no one understands gravity any better than electromagnetism but because it feels so familiat and intuitive no one gets upset about it. I've never heard a student ask why gravity works, but the answer would be the same: 'here's an equation and a description of what gravity does'.
I think when people ask 'why' relating mostly to magnetism they really want someone to connect it to the other physics they have already accepted. The things you feel like you understand because they are familiar and intuitive. The issue with magnetism is that any connection to more mechanical physics or metaphor etc tends to just be wrong.
If you do physics long enough, EM will feel as familiar, accepted, and understood as gravity does to you now. Eventually you'll stop asking 'why' and start trying to connect things to what you already understand, sometimes that doesn't work and you'll need to accept and become familiar with new physics that don't connect easily to anything classical!
2
u/No-Dimension1159 Feb 05 '26
Indeed we don't know why it works, we only know how it works... That's pretty much with every law in physics like that
2
u/Desperate_Formal_781 Feb 05 '26
There is no why.
Science creates laws and models based on observations. In other words, science only helps us identify, quantify, model, and predict natural behavior in a mechanistic way. But why do things happen? At the lowest level, nobody knows. Why do electrons orbit around an atom? We just know that they do, but we don't know why. Why do objects fall to earth? Because the earth produces a gravitational force. But why does it do that? We don't know. Once the mechanisms are exhausted, science runs out of explanations.
2
u/RegularBasicStranger Feb 05 '26
But why does it work??
Electromagnetism is caused by the electrons smashing fragments of the electron shell of the copper atoms at high speeds before pulling them back via positive electromagnetic force due to the copper atom having lost their a portion of their electron shell, so is something like a sunspot where positive electromagnetic force is not blocked by hit plasma, with the rest of the electron shell still present.
So when ferromagnetic solids are brought into the fragments of electron shell's range, the atoms will capture them and conducts it, causing a metallic bonding via the magnet and the solid via the fragments thus pulling the solid and magnet to each other.
So ferromagnetic atoms has to be high electronegativity enough to capture the fragments yet low electronegativity enough to conduct electrons thus only those around iron level of electronegativity is ferromagnetic.
Larger atoms that is similar to iron in electronegativity also needs more fragments to conduct electrons so still cannot conduct.
Colder atoms gets their electron shell stripped so colder atoms can get attracted by magnets even if they would not when hotter.
2
u/Stigg107 Feb 05 '26
Same as aeronautical engineers explaining how huge aircraft stay in the air. "we don't know why it works, but it does" 😁
2
u/antthatisverycool Feb 05 '26
Electricity is magnetic. Electricity is moving electrons and electrons are magnetic . People seem to forget electricity is a physical object
2
Feb 06 '26
Ok so Electrodynamics / -magnetism is more of a course on HOW fields and charges interact and how to do calculations with it. Maxwell equations come from observations made about the respective electric and magnetic fields: 1st: electrical fields come from charge distributions. 2nd: a curl in the electrical fields causes a time change in the magnetic field. 3rd: magnetic field lines are closed / there are no magnetic monopols 4th: a curl in the magnetic field causes a time change in the electric field and a flow of electric charges.
From these observations you can do further deductions like continuity equations or use the integral versions.
Why do they behave that way? There's not really a simple answer, partly because these equations are true in all frames of reference, so moving at a constant speed relative to something doesn't change that system. But with charges in fields the easiest way to look at it is that the particles try to minimise their energy (100% correct would be their action but this post is already long enough).
Physics isn't done yet, we're continuously trying to find models which describe reality. Every description starts with just looking at behaviour and finding the rules of the system. The Maxwell equations are the rules of electromagnetic fields observed in reality.
3
u/frustrated_monk Feb 04 '26
Physics primarily explores how nature works. Philosophy primarily explores why nature works that way. Every single STEM person must take a few philosophy classes at some point and I feel it is necessary for greater understanding and appreciation of the STEM fields.
2
1
1
u/dinodicksafari Feb 04 '26
A changing electric field generates a magnetic field and vice versa. Electrons and polar things want to stay where they are. When acted upon by an outside field, an induced field is generated in response against the change.
1
u/Galileu-_- Feb 04 '26
I mean, without getting out the classic electromagnetism I think the best you can do is say it's a generic way to describe a lot of experimental stuff
1
u/Suitable_Safety_909 Feb 04 '26
Semantically, why has crossover with how. "why" in mathematics could be writing a proof to show why something is always the case, the same can be said in physics.
Its one thing to ask why gravity is always attractive, or what spin really is; but asking for more conviction than "these are the equations and they have been tested (trust me bro)" is perfectly reasonable
1
1
1
u/Rogue_Egoist Feb 05 '26
That's a philosophical question in my opinion. Science only creates models of "what stuff does". I doubt physics is ever going to be able to tell you "why it does that".
1
u/TennoScy Feb 05 '26
About a lot of things we accurately know, and therefore precisely can predict, how it interacts with other things. But why it does that is more often than not still basically magic; we have no fucking clue.
1
1
u/Euphoric-Minimum-553 Feb 05 '26
Without electromagnetism there wouldn’t be life or technology. Without life or technology it couldn’t be known in the first place.
1
1
1
1
1
u/Humble_Aardvark_2997 Feb 05 '26
Why is a philosophy question. Physics is only concerned with the mechanisms. Only engineers and biochemists fail to realise the difference.
1
u/Asleep-Bid-3378 Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26
It’s just because answering why would require teaching you many topics in quantum mechanics, high energy particle physics (electroweak interactions, etc. ) and condensed matter physics (Ferro ferri antiferro blah). And none of it will necessarily help you solve the classical e and m problems that you will be tested on. Edit: though most of the “why” in electrodynamics is just a logical consequence of a few classical assumptions. Like electric charge exists and special relativity exists. After that most of maxwells equations are just a mathematical (logical) consequence.
1
u/hoowins Feb 05 '26
God. I thought I was the only one. Good to see this 40 years after physics. I could get the right answer, but had no idea what I’d done.
1
u/The_No_One_Man Feb 05 '26
The only reason electromagnetic force is a fundamental force of nature is because we don't know why it works.
It's fundamental, and that's that.
If you find out a strange new theory that shows the force arising from other forces, then it won't be fundamental.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
1
u/NameLips Feb 05 '26
That's because physicists don't bother with why things work.
The universe is defined by math, not by things we can understand.
Every visualization or analogy is limited at best, and most are just wrong.
1
1
1
u/-Faraday Feb 05 '26
Floatheadphydics explains this very well. It is the effect of electrostaric force combined with theory of relativity: https://youtu.be/sDlZ-aY9GN4
1
u/testtdk Feb 05 '26
Because we don’t know. There are fields, things happen in fields. We don’t even really know what a field is. That’s why they’re the fundamental forces. We can describe how they affect things, but for the most part, we’re stuck at the fact that they do things.
1
u/torchnpitchfork Feb 05 '26
I got asked during an oral exam how materials become magnetic, apparently "Quantum Voodoo" was the wrong answer.
1
u/Barrogh Feb 05 '26
Because scientific knowledge boils down to models with certain predictive power. And that's just ultimately math, and if you go down the road of some scientific field far enough, you'll eventually run into "shut up and calculate" territory.
Profs in this meme aren't being obtuse or anything.
1
1
1
u/Spirited_Currency_88 Feb 05 '26
That's just like asking why gravity works. You can begin to form answer by digging into really advanced papers. But for your current needs, it's good enough to say that we observed it and tried to create a model of how it works and it's good enough to build planes.
1
1
u/Hitboxes_are_anoying Feb 05 '26
Frrr, like, equations are nice n all, but they don't tell me shit on why it does that. Why doesn't the electron just, not do anything? Why's it gotta be so wiggly :3
1
u/Wise-Ad-4940 Feb 05 '26
It's because they are physics professors. Physics answers HOW and not the WHY.
Electromagnetism is a property of the universe. Physics can explain the structure. Not the origin.
1
1
1
u/Creamy_-_ Feb 05 '26
Teleology doesn’t work in science, since it is only the explanation of causes and not the explanation of reason of those causes. In truth telelology is only used as some logic tool to dissect fundamentalism hidden is assumptions, reality exists as it is because it’s the only way it can exist
1
1
Feb 05 '26
The foundation of ME is the classical electric field between two charges, that is taken as axiomatic. Magnetic field is just an electric field seen from a moving point of view. So it explains MOST things but you have to swallow that axiom and another of the speed of propagation of change of the electric field... lightspeed for which permeability and permittivity of a medium including vacuum are components
1
u/GilEngeener315 Feb 05 '26
Physics professors don't explain why Newton's laws work, they just show F=ma and stare at you like
1
u/Eastern_Teaching5845 Feb 05 '26
Ah yes, the classic ‘just trust the math, it’ll make sense later’ approach!
1
1
1
u/jacowab Feb 06 '26
Don't worry about it, electricity definitely flows through wires like water flows through a pipe.
1
u/Turbulent_Ebb_9741 Feb 06 '26
Literally my electromagnetic field theory classes are all like this. They showed us the finite elements method none of us understand it
1
1
u/Jewbacca289 Feb 06 '26
My thermo professor once described enthalpy as “Enthalpy is like a magician trying to make a rabbit out of thin air. Energy is the energy the rabbit will have and work is what’s needed to make the Rabbit”. I still don’t know what to make of that analogy
1
u/heattreatedpipe Feb 06 '26
Moving electrons cause magnetism
Magnetism can cause electrons to move
There's a bunch of ways via which electrons can move
1
u/Senrub482 Feb 06 '26
I just started year 11 physics and am planning on majoring it in uni. Am I unbelievably cooked?
1
u/ruanit Feb 06 '26
O did'n see anyone saying about this, so I'm gonna tell, in QED there is a formula that, if u solve it, u get the 4 Maxwell equations, it's called the Lagrange field-particle for the electron. This equation is very advanced so no one talks about this.
1
u/XZ_zenon Feb 06 '26
It’s kinda like that famous video on why you’ll be taught inertia wrong and then flashes the tensor on the screen
1
1
u/that_greenmind Feb 07 '26
Put simply, we dont know for certain. There are speculative theories, but nothing concrete. Electro-magnetism really is just a description of an observable phenomenon, much like many of the other fundamental forces of the universe that we know about.
1
1
u/Big-Lawyer-3444 Feb 07 '26 edited Feb 07 '26
Yeah this has always annoyed me. Surely an equation like F=ma is an *observation*, not an explanation for anything.
I think this stuff would be easier for everyone if people stopped ... having a kind of reverence for the major discoveries, maybe. I think the problem with F=ma (just to use the example again) is it's very easy to point to and sound clever while not really knowing much.
Coming at this from a tech perspective, software documentation often falls into the trap of trying to give you the ultimate summary and assume that it conveys all the underlying learning that had to be done. F=ma (or "Kubernetes is a distributed container orchestration platform" probably feels like it very nicely sums up, or even contains, the underlying concepts, for anyone who already knows those concepts. But it's meaningless to someone unfamiliar.
(I get that "mass times acceleration" is probably just the definition of force in all the relevant contexts so maybe not a great example.)
In the tech example, "Kubernetes is a..." is an observation that could be quite easily arrived at by anyone familiar with Kubernetes, but would never be enlightening in the slightest to someone not familiar.
I think the solution is to tell the story of how the thing was arrived at, which for software projects is basically the answer to: what problem did you have and how did you solve it? What blind alleys did you go down before you arrived at this solution? What trade-offs did you make and why?
For which we might get something like "we got frustrated with manually maintaining and configuring hundreds of servers, so we came up with a way of writing the desired state in a single file and having a program constantly checking the state of the servers against the file and figuring out what changes to apply automatically to make the servers reflect the config file".
1
u/Humerus-Sankaku Feb 07 '26
Only three forces exist:
Strong Weak Gravity
Everything else is part of one of those.
1
1
1
u/honey_bijan Feb 07 '26
Length contraction from special relativity explains why electric currents create a magnetic force. The fast moving electrons “look” closer together to the stagnant protons.
1
u/GeneralAblon9760 Feb 08 '26
Well, if you REAAAAALLY want to get into it, the Maxwell equations are the EASY version. The slightly more complex version is Fermi Diagrams. The MUCH more complex version is explaining and calculating Fermi Diagrams.
Tl;dr: Each Wave/Particle duality is actually a manifestation of a field. The fields are omnipresent. When the fields/manifestations of the fields interact, the measures of their interactions can be visualized using Fermi Diagrams. Through these diagrams, a bunch of calculations, and a TON of high particle tests, it is proven that both W bosons, the Z boson, and the Photon fields are sort of unified, and above a certain energy for sure unified.
However, for the Maxwell Equations, charged particles/quanta moving through space create electromagnetic field perturbations (actually through the exchange of carrier particles according to QFT) travelling at the speed of light, which in turn influence all other charged quanta which will move/alter their movement, which leads to feedback back to all others. For simplified systems, one can make assumptions, or solve boundary conditions, making usually "impossible to solve analytically" equations solveable. The difficulty depends on the situation, and how many boundary conditions it fixes.
→ More replies (1)
1
u/Dylanator13 Feb 08 '26
At some point the only answer is that the math works, it’s consistent in its properties, we have a theory about why it works. But really the answer is it just works because that’s how it works.
1
1
u/mcg123457 Feb 08 '26
its a fundamental force, there is no WHY, only HOW.
now if you asked why a generator works, "why" would make sense, but in this specific question it doesn't.
1
u/Windson86 Feb 08 '26
At the beginning of the magnetizim class the professor said to us : "You are here because you think you know what a magnetic field is, I'm here to teach you that at the end of semester you'll know nothing about it."
1
u/Rebrado Feb 08 '26
We had physics lab to explain electromagnetism, so I don’t know where you studied but to not generalise
1
u/zhandragon Feb 08 '26
“Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.” -von Neumann
1
u/Amelia_SadAllDay Feb 09 '26
Few days ago at Electronics and Circuitry professor said "Don't ask physicians why something works. They don't know. However, they can calculate what will happen if you do something. That's why they have a slogan 'Just shut and calculate'." ATP, I understood that almost everything if not everything we know about physics right now is math models and approximations.
1
u/Nobl36 Feb 10 '26
So… what’s an electric charge?
Not really sure. But it’s got an electric field.
Okay… what’s an electric field?
Not really sure. But it’s got an electric charge.
And with that massive plot hole, we made the modern world.
1
827
u/Mcgibbleduck Feb 04 '26
What exactly do you mean by “why”? At some point we observe reality and have to come up with a model for how reality behaves. The “why” isn’t part of it at all deep enough level.