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How Do Atoms Produce Magnetism? (youtu.be)
3 points by mickfaraday 2147 days ago
1 comments

[Reposting a previous comment, with a few minor changes.]

The animations are nice, but the video has a lot of errors. For example:

> Surface-to-surface transmission of e-shell rotation between aligned shells of atoms constitutes electricity.

That is definitively not how electricity work in a wire. The electrons are moving inside the conductors. (There are some technical details, for example an electron in a crystal has a different effective mass than an isolated electron, but they are moving anyway, not rotating.)

> The reason that magnetic action extends beyond the current-carrying wire’s apparent surface is that while 99.999% of the electron exists within 430 pm of the nucleus, there is a small chance of finding that surface extended to incredible distances. In fact, under Quantum Mechanics, the radial distribution function for the electron has no limit on reach.

> We imagine the physical extensions of the atomic surface are responsible for the action-at-a-distance. Lateral magnetic motion of conductive rotating e-shells thus synergizes between current-aligned wires, pulling them together as shown in Figure 2 below (panels A and B).

This effect decays exponentially. A few nanometers away the wave function and probability density is completely negligible, and so is the effect of the orbital shape. On the other hand, the effect of magnetism of a wire decays like 1/r and can easily be measure a few cm away (or more if the magnet is strong enough). So this part of the explanation is wrong.