We don’t understand what electricity is | Hacker News Reader

We don’t understand what electricity is

ribbonfarm.com

By these standards, we don’t understand what *anything* is because if you keep drilling down you encounter some sort of brute fact or an equation we only understand qualitatively.

The author could have picked anything. They could have written “We don’t understand what Chairs are” and it’d be the same article.

I understand your point, but I agree with the author that this lack of understanding is more painful with electricity than with chairs

Howso? We are just as able to use electricity in practical matters as we are chairs, arguably moreso. Our society at least understands electricity well enough to manipulate it very deftly. It seems the lack of understanding really isn't holding us back much.

Speaking of chairs, it reminds me of Richard Feynman, who happened to make the same comment using the example of a chair. https://fs.blog/2012/01/richard-feynman-on-why-questions/

> Interviewer: If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?

> [...]

> I can say is the magnetic force makes them repel, and that you’re feeling that force.

> You say, “That’s very strange, because I don’t feel a kind of force like that in other circumstances.” When you turn them the other way, they attract. There’s a very analogous force, electrical force, which is the same kind of a question, that’s also very weird. But you’re not at all disturbed by the fact that when you put your hand on a chair, it pushes you back. But we found out by looking at it that that’s the same force, as a matter of fact (an electrical force, not magnetic exactly, in that case). But it’s the same electric repulsions that are involved in keeping your finger away from the chair because it’s electrical forces in minor and microscopic details. There are other forces involved, connected to electrical forces. It turns out that the magnetic and electrical force with which I wish to explain this repulsion in the first place is what ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start with to explain many other things that everybody would just accept. You know you can’t put your hand through the chair; that’s taken for granted. But that you can’t put your hand through the chair, when looked at more closely, why, involves the same repulsive forces that appear in magnets. The situation you then have to explain is why, in magnets, it goes over a bigger distance than ordinarily. There it has to do with the fact that in iron all the electrons are spinning in the same direction, they all get lined up, and they magnify the effect of the force ’til it’s large enough, at a distance, that you can feel it. But it’s a force which is present all the time and very common and is a basic force of almost – I mean, I could go a little further back if I went more technical – but on an early level I’ve just got to tell you that’s going to be one of the things you’ll just have to take as an element of the world: the existence of magnetic repulsion, or electrical attraction, magnetic attraction.

Okay, so what I didn't realize when I read this last night was that the blogpost is meant to be the first in a semi-satirical series of blog posts.

I definitely took the author too seriously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com