Blog post: swansont: Sane Clown Posse Time

Vertiasium and Minute Physics team up to explain magnets.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM]

I was worried for a minute they were going to leave it at "magnets behave that way because electrons behave like tiny magnets" which only moves the goalposts, but there's a nice reality check there, and it's good even though they don't delve too much into the quantum — they gloss over that it's related to spin, and also lean a little on the Bohr description of the orbital motion. (IOW, it's not that the orbital motion cancels, per se, it's that there are no classical trajectories to begin with.

I saw this at It's Okay to be Smart, and in a followup I think that Joe is right when he claims that when Feynman says (in the last video in the link) he can't explain magnets, he's not actually saying he can't explain what the videos covered — he actually does (briefly) mention the answer. He's explaining why "why" questions are difficult in physics — we always hit that point (mentioned in the video above) where you have to say "No-one knows. That's just the way the universe works".
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