Fun fact: next time you see the moon in the day, study the angle of the sunlight hitting it — it doesn’t appear to line up with the sun. This is a perspective trick based on the fact the sun is way further away than the moon yet we perceive them the same distance. And no I cannot intuitively grasp this.
Comment on Hummingbird feet
EmergMemeHologram@startrek.website 10 months agoI remember asking my teacher why you could see the moon during the day and my teacher told me you couldn’t.
This too left me very confused, because I had seen the moon that very morning from the school yard.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
uid0gid0@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It has to do with apparent size of the sun and moon. The sun is 400 times wider than the moon and coincidentally 400 times further away, so they look the same size. With no other reference points as to how big each object thing is, we perceive them to be the same distance.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That bit I can at least fully comprehend. It’s the sunlight angle thing I can’t wrap my head around.
uid0gid0@lemmy.world 10 months ago
psud@aussie.zone 10 months ago
Stupid/inconstant adults stick in your mind. I’m lucky to have mostly had good teachers, just one teaching vowels one week taught us a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y
Then the next week tested our learning, and marked my answer “a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y” wrong because it’s only aeiou. Sure teacher. No vowels at all in by, but the same sound at the beginning of bicycle has one.
I think they must have been reading from a book when teaching, but working from their own ideas for the test
evranch@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Last year my daughter told me her grade 4 teacher had told the class “Well nobody really knows how magnets work” to which my science-obsessed daughter replied “You mean you don’t really know how magnets work!”
I confirmed to her that yes, our understanding of magnetism is about as complete as it can get. Of all the mysteries the universe has to offer, magnetism is not one of them.
wedeworps@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
What that teacher probably wanted to say was that, while we can explain how magnetism works, no one can tell you why it happens.
venoft@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Nature doesn’t have a reason to do things. There’s no ‘why’ in anything, other than ‘the laws of physics make it do so’.
Gabu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Therein lies the issue. We don’t know shit about the fundamentals of magnetism, other than “it sort of just follows the rules of electricity”.
madejackson@lemmy.world 10 months ago
For completeness, we cannot say for sure if we even exist. The universe could very well just be an imagination and nothing really matters, including the laws of physics and our understanding of magnets.
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Okay, but, with other forces, like electricity, we understand that elections are bumping down the line and the force/motion of that can be used to do work or something.
With magnetism, it’s more like, a complete black box, we can see what happens when we do x, but we have no idea what makes it do that. Magnetism it’s measurable, we know it exists, we don’t know how it exists. We know it works, but we can’t figure out why it works.
It’s a bit like gravity. We have some good theories, but that’s about it.
gens@programming.dev 10 months ago
Feynman on magnets and these kind of questions.
jasondj@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
4th grade seems to be about the right maturity level to become a huge ICP fan, so it checks out.
Olhonestjim@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s just that magnetism is really complicated the deeper you go, and there’s nothing else to compare it to.
DroneRights@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I don’t wanna talk to no scientists
can@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
They’re just lyin’, and getting me pissed