Hi everyone and welcome to the new Megathread :) For my first Mega I want to share a special interest of mine: the magnetic field and how to understand its behavior intuitively.
I'm guessing most of us have played with magnets before at some point and have felt that mysterious force pushing them apart or pulling them together, depending on how the magnets are oriented toward each other. Some of you may have also seen diagrams like this
(By Geek3 - Own work,This file was derived from: Ironfilings cylindermagnet.svg This file was derived from: Magnet compasses.svg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88524982)
Or done an experiment where you visualize the magnetic field lines with iron filings like this
(Public domain, Newton Henry Black, Harvey N. Davis (1913) Practical Physics, The MacMillan Co., USA, p. 242, fig. 200)
These lines represent the shape of the magnetic field. The way you can interpret them is that if you place a compass in the field, the compass will align with the field lines at that point. And the closer the lines are to each other, the stronger the magnetic field is in that area. Also, magnetic field lines always form closed loops. They appear to end at the poles of a magnet, but actually they continue on inside the magnet. They do however exit/enter the magnet at the poles.
"But Witchy," you may ask, "why are the lines so concentrated at the poles but then they spread out so much as they travel from one pole of the magnet to the other?" Excellent question my theoretical student XD.
This is I think the key point that was a bit of a eureka moment for me when I realized it a long time ago when I was studying this stuff: the magnetic field lines "want" to be as short as possible while also "wanting" to be as far apart as possible. And when I say want, it does actually behave a little bit like a desire, as the magnetic objects in this field will experience a magnetic force tryin gthe move the object to spread out the field lines and make them shorter.
Let's use this picture I grabbed from Wikipedia as an example:
(By Geek3 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10555891)
the bar magnet creates a strong magnetic field at the poles, which means lots of magnetic field lines are squeezed closely together at the poles where they enter/exit the magnet. These lines don't want to be so tightly packed together, so they immediately start spreading out but also immediately start curving towards the opposite pole to try to keep the distance short. If you then try to bring the north pole of another bar magnet close to the north pole of this one, both have magnetic field lines coming out trying to get to their respective south poles, but now even more tightly packed together as you bring the magnets together. Since the magnetic field lines don't want to be so close together, both magnets experience a force pushing each other away so that the magnetic field lines aren't being pushed together so tight.
Similarly, if the south pole of one bar magnet is brought near the north pole of another, the magnetic field lines exiting the north pole of one want to go to the south pole, but the closest south pole is the south pole of the other magnet being brought close, so now the lines go through both magnets before looping back around:
(By Geek3 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10515628)
However, between the closest poles of the two magnets, the lines are still concentrated but will try to spread out between the poles. Since the lines want to be as short as possible and don't want to spread out, the magnetic field exerts a force on the bar magnets pulling them together, since that would shorten the lines between the poles down to pretty much nothing.
Finally, a few of you may have been wondering what determines how much the magnetic field lines want to spread out vs shorten. These two tendencies are in opposition pretty much all the time, since spreading the lines out more requires making them longer. This is determined by something called the magnetic permeability which is a property of the materials that the field is passing through (even air or a vacuum). High permeability materials tend to concentrate the magnetic field lines more and allow them to get shorter, while low permeability materials tend to force the lines to spread out and lengthen. Examples of materials with high permeability are iron, cobalt, and other magnetic or ferromagnetic materials. Low permeability are pretty much anything that doesn't experience force in a magnetic field, so most things.
Post thumbnail attribution: (By Omegatron - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=640068)
Anyway I hope some of you enjoyed this rant or find the information here useful. I can talk about magnets all day so feel free to hit me up if you want, though my inbox will be overflowing for the next week I'm guessing.
Enjoy the Mega!
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I think this is a good framing, but honestly yeah I feel like a lot of my interactions are ungendered, at least from my perspective. Then again, I think I avoid gendered interactions intentionally, for instance public bathrooms and changerooms. I never feel like "I should respond in this fashion because people are perceiving me as a woman" or "I should respond this way to perform my gender" I kinda just do what feels right for me.
But, I mean, I'm 15 years in to transition... so... my fem voice is habitual (I can't do a masc voice anymore), the way I carry myself is too, my hair looks fem because I just like it that way... it's all kind of instinctive at this point. So, in a way, I Gender A Lot, in the sense that I give off the performative signals, but subconsciously. I did, years ago, carefully construct the signals I wanted to give off, decide how I wanted to act (mostly to be happy with myself), and you could say that this is a facet of Doing A Gender, I guess?
Yeah been there, still kinda feel nostalgic for the music forums, who broke me out of the Christian Rock rut I was stuck in when I was like 14.
I haven't been in a changeroom since childhood... never thought of public bathrooms as a gendered social interaction though, and I (at least used to, much less now) use those all the time, huh. I am probably genuinely entirely unaware.
I wonder about how I carry myself, now that I think about it. I know I stand different now but that's not really conscious, my knees bent inward at some point. I guess probably some of the ways I exist read typically femme, but the constructing-signals and performative thing, uh... I never really internalised the passage from orange book in which Maria talks about how 'there's going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present myself if I want to get read correctly'. In orange book parlence: Dude, no?
I really do not think about the gender connotations of what I wear or do. I tried internalising all the blue board bullshit, (DID YOU KNOW: FOR CHECKING YOUR NAILS FANNING YOUR FINGERS IS "MASC" BUT CURLING THEM IS "FEMME"???? It is not, but such is the board lmao) but it never actually worked and unironically I had a way worse correctly-gendered percentage back when I was trying to intentionally present "as a woman". It unironically seems to work better when I don't give a shit, and wear like hoodies and sweats and shit. Unsure if this is a natural-comfort-confidence thing or a hormones thing or something else...
Holy fuck how horrifying