Item — HN Reader

This crazy thought keeps haunting me:

> The simplest generator consists of just a coil of wire and a bar magnet. When you push the magnet through the middle of the coil, an electric current is produced in the wire.

Here is the crazy thought: What if we took other materials and tried using it the same way as the generator? Does that produce another form of energy (not electric current) but something totally different which we can’t even detect? What’s to say that only electric current can be generated but some other forms of energy too?

What happens if we push a crystal through the coil? A rock which isn’t magnetic? A piece of wood? What effect does that have on atomic scale that we can’t even detect or measure?

4 comments

You can't just say "other forms of energy". That's a massive hand-wave. The electromagnetic field can be detected and manipulated experimentally. It also has reasonable theories of explanation and mathematics to describe its function. The theories made predictions that we later verified with experiments (meaning the theories were not just post-hoc descriptions).

A magnet is not special; it is just a material where lots of the magnetic domains are aligned in the same direction such that the overall magnetic field doesn't cancel to zero at a distance. Not all molecules have much of a magnetic moment themselves either so even if they were to align that doesn't mean they'd exhibit much of an overall field. Water falls into this bucket. It takes super strong magnets and super sensitive detectors to make MRIs work precisely because water's ability to be magnetized is so insanely small.

Also crystal is an arrangement of solid matter, not a thing unto itself. It just means the electromagnetic charges and shape of the molecule make the atoms want to orient in 3d space into a regular pattern. Any molecule that self-organizes into a repeating geometric pattern as it transitions from liquid creates a crystal.

I think we can start by checking whether energy is conserved given everything we know. If not, then you may have discovered a new particle/force.

(If we didn’t know about electromagnetic induction, and pushed the magnet through the coil, then we’d find that energy is not conserved.)

Read the Sean Carroll article referenced upthread. If simple stuff like this would yield useful energy, we'd already know about it.

Fwiw, that's the mechanical basis of many rituals and sacraments that one day will be understood by science. For example, the eucharist ceremony is a carefully designed sequence to produce a certain uplifting current, vaguely perceptible in some cases, but not measurable today.

For example, we know that there are these weird neutrinos, but if we were to find a method of constraining them within a pipe, the produced current might have unusual properties. Pretty much any foo flowing within another type of foo will create a new type of current.

Or, your 'certain uplifting current' is just activation of a neural pleasure center, that humans are pre-disposed to as the result of 10's of generations of 'selection' where individuals who didn't enjoy the ritual in some way or another were not as successful at passing on their genes, either by lack of bonding with others in the ritual group, to down right exclusion from it.

>certain uplifting current' is just activation of a neural pleasure center

What is the difference between these two things from a purely physical point of view?

This sort of materialistic prejudice is common today. Science is about sticking to proven facts and using strict logic when deriving new facts, but refusing to even consider new ideas isn't science, it's lowly prejudice and adherence to groupthink.

Are you sure you (personally) know the difference between a sacrament and, say, a bicycle pump?