Think about it. Isn’t light+eyes and ears+sound just the same in terms of their “influence at a distance”? We don’t feel that as abnormal or magic - simply because we’ve sensors for them and are used to it. But physically speaking light and magnetism are based on electromagnetic forces.
You can implant a small magnet in your fingertip and then have the ability to sense magnetic fields.
It doesn't even have to be a finger. There are so many underused parts of the body
Why do I feel called out by this comment
Any nipple can be a magnetic antenna
Finally mens nipples get something to be useful at.
I vote for mens liberation and rights for magnetic nipples!
Magnetically sensitive taint here I come!
With my luck I'd get stuck to a steel chair
Never lose a game of musical chairs tho
You stand up and the chair sticks to you like a gmod model
Don't be gross tammy
Get ready to make friends with every TSA agent you see for the rest of your life, and pray you never need an MRI.
detecting magnetism will rarely be useful for humans especially in the context of survival
Fair point, but then, most people don't have this.
And even if you do it, you need to get some experience for your brain to develop a model of what to expect in certain situations. For instance, your brain will need some time to get used to the fact, that putting our hand on a fridge will give the brain new sensory stimuli because of the magnets on the fridge.
This intuitive understanding of light and sound is just that - brain neurons being used to what to expect. And even with an implant you would need to train that.
Though I'm definitely curious to experience once how that would feel like 😄
Get a tight-fitting glove, sew some magnets onto the fingers, wear the glove for awhile.
At least that won’t be disastrous if you need an emergency mri, they’ll just take it off
And you can still go through airport security.
I think it also feels like magic because we haven’t developed much intuition about the way magnets work. If you had thousands or millions of magnetic items in your life, you would develop that intuition, which would shatter the magic. Obviously, not being able to see or feel magnetic fields plays a big role too.
For example, ropes, strings and cables are very familiar. You have a good intuitive understanding on how they work, because you’ve used them so much. There’s nothing magical about them. Imagine what it would be like if today is the first day when you learn to tie a knot. You could do completely magical things like attach two ropes together. You could even keep a box closed by tiring a rope around it.
We kinda do though, we just don't often see them as having magnets but most electric motors work on principles of magnetism.
We can also see a knot and understand that is how the rope is doing what we want. We cant see magnetic fields, nor can we even detect them directly with our senses aside from metal fillings around a magnet. If we could detect magnetic fields like some fish, we would probably find magnets much more intuitive.
What if you implanted thousands of small magnets just underneath your skin all over your body?
You would be in serious trouble if you ever needed an MRI…
Actually putting a magnet in your fingertip so you can "feel" magnetic objects is a bodymod I've heard some people do
But yeah, like @Pons_Aelius@kbin.social said, MRIs probably aren't an option ever again unless you have it removed. I guess removing one from your finger would be easier than everywhere on your body.
Edit: I should have read the comment section before typing this, people are already talking about it lol
I wonder if that works with, like, jewelry. Could you build up the same sensations if you, say, practically always wore rings with magnets in them?
I think so. I posted this link above about a belt that gives users a sense of direction relative to the Earth's magnetic field.
I would guess probably! Just less sensitive, I think they put them in fingertips specifically because of the amount of touch sensitive nerves.
because we don't have biological sensors for it
Honestly. The evidence for or against this is still far from certain.
New evidence for a human magnetic sense that lets your brain detect the Earth’s magnetic field
Fair point, I didn't know about that. But even then, most of us don't feel like we can feel it - and in the modern city living spaces it gets even less important to train such a sense.
Earth's field is very large and very weak compared to small strong household magnets.
Whatever senses we've evolved for navigation could be dealing in a completely different scales so as to be useless.
It might be like trying to use a 5ml teaspoon to measure the volume liquid in a of a bathtub.
or using an alcohol thermometer to measure the temperature of molten iron
Insane Clown Posse would like to have a word with you
My daughter and her friends are all into ICP and all I can think of is the fact that they're too stupid to understand magnetism and think that no one else understands it either.
Magnetize their faygo and only tell them about it later
She doesn't drink Faygo, but I'm just happy she hasn't started painting her face yet.
We don't have sensors to directly sense a single magnetic field, but if you've played with magnets a lot, you can definitely "feel" how their forces work and develop kind of an intuitive physical sense.
Perhaps a good example/analogy of something we can feel and understand somewhat intuitively but actually do not scientifically understand is gravity. You can definitely feel its effects / force, even though you don't have a specific gravitational field sensor in your body per say.
We have very good theories and formulas for calculating gravitational effects, but we still fundamentally do not understand what causes it.
[Y]ou don't have a specific gravitational field sensor in your body per say.
I'd argue that the vestibular system in your inner ear qualifies as a gravitational field sensor.
The example with gravity is interesting indeed. We have only acceleration sensors behind our ears, but our body notices the pressure of the body tissue pressing down towards the gravity. And obviously, we also feel gravity when moving.
However, the difference to magnetism is, that we frankly don't have any contact with magnets during our evolution - except for the earth's magnetic field.
Even if we are able to sense it, it's definitely far from being able to reliably feel it like we do for gravity.
Instructions unclear, super glued magnets to my body.
Gotta ask a carrier pigeon on that to confirm.
It's magic because unlike light or sound, we don't really know how it works.
Would you mind defining "we don't really know how it works"?
If the greatest minds of our age don't know, what hope do we mere mortals have?
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
I have to disagree there regardless of how one interprets "know".
If you mean "know intuitively", then we don't, precisely because we have no sensors for it and hence no experience with it. We intuitively know light, because we sense it and know what to expect in a closed room with no light source.
If you mean it scientifically, then light and magnets are extensively studied and far from "know nothing about it". Our knowledge of light, magnetism and sound is very good on all levels.
In addition, light and magnetism is the same field. The electromagnetic field. It's just different forms of it.
No, we don't, and ICP was right. Broken clocks and all that.
We don't understand the origins of the strong force or relationship between electromagnetism and gravity.
Here, Feynman is not afraid to say we don't know at the end of a very relevant rant about magnetic attraction/repulsion.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
well, humans do have magnetic sensors towards each other
it's named "attractions"
I feel like this was a joke that nobody got.
It's a joke, but a bad one.
And at the same time, "repulsion".
That is a description of emotions by analogy. Not a magnetic sensor.
whoosh
