To: Mark Felton
Yup, I am a electrician, and it is the fascination with it that caused me to get into the field. There is a great deal of effects that we use, and don't understand, like why the electrons flow on the outside circumference of the wire?. And of course magnetism that we have formulas for, yet only use something we don't understand.
The strange thing is that we have this same lack of understanding in most every field of work, including medicine and drugs for a great example.
These guys are making pills that create certain effects and don't have a clue as to why.
Physics is just one of many.....????????
To: Cold Heat; Mark Felton
I don't know what gives you guys the idea that "we don't understand" electromagnetism. The quantum theory of electromagnetism was in hand in the 1940's. The successor theory, which shows how it morphs into the weak nuclear force at high enough energies, was in hand in the 1960's; experiment only caught up to it in the 1980's. Theory and experiment agree to something like thirteen decimal places, and the same theory works quantitatively over an astonishing range of scales, from femtometers to tens of billions of light years.
Of course we understand things like magnetism, repulsion, and the flow of current around a wire. That understanding goes back more like 100 years.
Do we think the current theory is the final theory? No, but the corrections we gain from unification with the strong and/or gravitational forces will be so exquisitely subtle that they will be experimentally unmeasurable at any naturally occurring energy scale. In other words, the current theory will give numerically correct results for all natural occurrences.
It is widely considered that the modern theory of electromagnetism is the most perfect theory of anything ever constructed by the mind of man. There is simply no scientific subject that is more completely and correctly understood.
To: Cold Heat
There is a great deal of effects that we use, and don't understand, like why the electrons flow on the outside circumference of the wire?
You're absolutely correct that there are many things we do not yet understand. Not to nitpick, but the example you used (charge flowing to the outside of a conductor) is something we do understand.
To: Cold Heat
There is a great deal of effects that we use, and don't understand, like why the electrons flow on the outside circumference of the wire?. Huh? That's where the free electrons are. The ones inside are all shared by multiple atoms, while the ones on the outer surface are free to skip from one to another.
90 posted on
08/23/2006 2:18:19 PM PDT by
lepton
("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)
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