*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, January 2nd, 2014 5:10am PST - promote requested by original submitter shveddy.

Your Veritasium link is broken. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TKSfAkWWN0

And actually so are the 2nd and 3rd ones.

Thanks. The description is straight from the youtube video so I didn't check anything. I updated it to something more relevant though

Somewhere the Insane Clown Posse's heads just collectively exploded.

This was a pretty concise explanation of about a month of physics II lectures... minus the math.

Yeah. Do a degree in physics and you'll still not know "how magnets work." You can quantify everything about them, know how magnetic fields behave and affect other things, but not "how" they work. Instead you'll probably realise that we don't know how a lot of things work. We say "electric charge" with confidence and think we understand it, but at the end of the day, we don't know "how" it works. Charge is just a word that refers to something interesting we've seen, as is magnetism.

Sorry, I wasn't bashing the video... any time you can boil down most of the qualitative ideas of 12 lecture hours into a 6 minute video is a worthy time investment.
I'm was mostly trying to drunkenly convince myself the math I half remember was worth the other 11 hours.

Yeah, it'll be a while until we really 'understand' why everything is how it appears to be. But in the meantime, we can quantitatively describe most of the interesting effects down to the subatomic level. Which is great imo.

I'd have to say that if I can predict the results of every interaction, "how" those results come about is a rather pointless question. "What happens" trumps "how" every time.

Magic farting gremlins suck everything downwards at an acceleration of 9.8 m/s².

Sometimes how is just as important as the observable phenomena.

Throwing your brain at that kind of stuff changes it for the better no matter what you remember a few years down the line. It's a muscle, and understanding the mathematics behind magnetism like bench pressing a few hundred pounds, and besides, you can always brush up.

Nah...if it doesn't affect the results or the predictions, it doesn't really matter. Not to say that some of us won't be curious anyway, but that's the only real point. Gremlins or a convenient concept of warped space-time, if they cause identical effects, not only does it not matter, but nobody will ever be able to show which is correct.

"How" in this sense is identical to "Why", a neverending chain of questions that can never be completely answered. "What will happen" is where the meat is.

Man, I sure hope ICP are Sifters. This would explain so much to them.