[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.