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.
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. Pretty advanced stuff.
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.
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.
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.
You can implant a small magnet in your fingertip and then have the ability to sense magnetic fields.
Get ready to make friends with every TSA agent you see for the rest of your life, and pray you never need an MRI.
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
