[bonoboTP]

Before all the details we need to arrive at the right ballpark and establish the basics. I know on my example that even though I got through school with good grades, I was still full of misconceptions due to a few key errors fed from teachers, bullshit pseudo knowledge I picked up from ufo+mystery magazines and TV edutainment.

So first, there is nothing special about life. Life doesn't break the normal laws of physics we use to describe everything else. Our naive concept is often along the lines of a game engine with inputs coming "from outside", from spirits or something. But there's no evidence of that. Living material is ordinary.

Physics teachers will explain that heat doesn't go from cold to warm places. If you ask how fridges can exist, they may say "well, heat doesn't go there by itself", invoking some kind of magic explanation. Now I know there are more precise phrasing in physics, but that's beside my point. We grow up with a concept that there are things that happen "by themselves" and there are things that happen due to living creatures' actions. In this implicit naive view that many, including past me hold, a fridge does an exceptional thing because it vaguely obeys our effortful engineering intentions. We make it do that, it doesn't do it out of its own nature.

Actually in primary school physics class when we learned the concept of forces, we learned different categories: magnetic, gravitational, "holding/mounting" force, friction force, muscle force... And we had to label the arrows in different everyday cartoons, like a kid pulling a sled in the snow: muscle force towards the kid, gravity down, holding force from the ground up, friction force backward. As if muscle force was some irreducible special magic phenomenon in physics. While correctly teaching basic school-level vector calculus skills they failed at teaching fundamental world view skills.

Because there's no distinction like this. Life doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Of course this article also doesn't claim that, but as I said, it's important to first arrive on the same page, in the same ballpark before the high resolution discussion.

[frongpik]

"Life doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics" sounds similar to "magnetism does no work". Yet we know that magnetism creates macroscopic effects: a magnet can lift an iron nail, despite it does no work. The way it's explained is that magnetism somehow redirects other forces that do the work. My point is that something can do work without doing work "on paper" because all the work is done by others.

[bonoboTP]

Where did you hear that magnetism does no work?

I remember learning in school that the magnetic field does work on objects and the magnetic potential energy is converted into kinetic energy in the process.

[jbay808]

There seems to be a bit of a rabbit hole here. It starts with the magnetic field interacting with charged particles only at right angles to their motion, meaning that it cannot do work on them. Work is done by electric fields that are induced by time-varying magnetic fields. Then there are objections that they can do work on magnetic dipoles (eg two permanent magnets rotating into alignment). This is countered with an objection that permanent magnets are actually a virtual coil from the current sheet orbiting the magnet's surface, so the former holds and work is done by induced electric fields. This is countered by the point that elementary particles with spin can have magnetic fields. Eventually the argument is declared a draw when someone points out that magnetic fields don't actually exist, and are just electric fields viewed from different relativistic reference frames.

[frongpik]

This deserves its own post on HN. Do you know what's the going theory about how magnetism induces the current loop? Something must tell electrons that it's time to move in the clockwise direction and that something moves at the speed of light.

[frongpik]

It's a quote from wikipedia: an electron, moving in a magnetic field, experiences a force perpendicular to its trajectory, so the work - the dot product of the force and trajectory vectors - is zero.

I should probably add one unscientific remark (orthodox HN readers: proceed with caution). Per [...], the secret of organic lifeforms and the secret of intelligence are very different things. Organic lifeforms keep their shit together by balancing two kinds of magnetisms - od and ob - to direct the electricity - aour. Od is constructive, ob is destructive and aour performs all the action. That's somewhat similar to scientific notation: the H and B magnetic fields and the E electric field.

[mrlala]

I think that's an insightful way to put things. While getting a chance to do some science with my kids during this crazy time, I was forced to put things into words and (relatively) simple terms for things that I always felt I was lacking knowledge, because of a similar type of teaching as you described. But as I began teaching some simple concepts, I for some reason had a better understand than I ever have, and was able to put them into very simple terms.

I feel like so many teachers are on autopilot with various topics that they don't know how to explain the most simple part of a concept, and instead make it infinitely more complicated and it seems magical.