My post-tenure sabbatical, alas, is officially over today, as I begin teaching the honors section of the introductory E&M class. This will keep me busy for most of the morning, which makes it the perfect opportunity for a Dorky Poll:
Electricity or magnetism?
Yes, I know they’re unified, and thus merely different manifestations of a single electromagnetic force. That’s not the question– you have to pick one or the other. Which one do you take?
Electricity would seem the obvious choice, given that the Internet isn’t much good without it. Magnetism has that cool and counter-intuitive thing going for it, with all those cross products and the lack of magnetic monopoles.
It’s a tough call, but I’ll go with magnetism. What’s your pick?
As William Gilbert and I both went to the same Grammar School it has to be magnetism in my case.
Electricity, because I like lightning.
Whichever one can easily be moved to a gauge such that there is a scalar potential. Duh. 🙂
good question though.
That’s weak, man.
“Electricty”, nothing to do with electricity and/or magnetism 😉
Bring on the Tesla coils!
It doesn’t matter. B=E/c for plane waves, and thats all a theorist needs for quantum optics!
When charge sparks a dielectric you call for an engineer. When magnetism sparks the vacuum physicists come running without a summons. Magnetism.
I’m on the fence here, so I’ll cop out and say electromagnetism.
Magnetism — for the monopoles!
The computer I am using to write this could probably be made to work without magnetism, although the secondary-storage architecture would need to be very different. I don’t see how it could work without electricity.
Ergo, electricity.
(Just for giggles, let’s imagine an internet that works not by electricity but by something else. Hydraulics? Pneumatics? Rodents of unusual size? (Yes, it’s called the Post Office.))
magnetism!
E, because we can at least pretend how it works (astrophysically).
Depends on the circumstances. If I were trying to get my computer to work, I’d pick electricity. If I were strapped into an electric chair, I’d pick magnetism.
Magnetism. In many plasma physics applications, you can transform away any electric field.
Granted, there are circumstances where you can transform away the magnetic rather than the electric field. But these circumstances are rare to nonexistent in plasmas.
Definitely magnetism, for all the really corny jokes you can make about it. And because my license plate says
DEL X B.
(Since my husband’s is DEL X E, I’ll vote for him and say electricity.) 😀
magnetism
E
Electricity. I love lightning storms, and I love being able to read late at night.
Electricity hands down. Love Gauss’ law, superposition principle, Resnick & Halliday problem of determining electric field inside off-centered spherical cavity in an otherwise uniformly charged sphere. That’s cool stuff….
Magnetism – fun to play with. Electricity just hurts you.
Electricity, because the math tends to be easier
Magnetism, because the curl is k3wl, g-factors are cooler, and because I am right handed.
However, I will also remind myself that magnetism is just a figment of a relativistic transformation of E, and others posting here that the electricity that powers your computer is produced using magnetism and transformed to an appropriate voltage by magnetism.
Magnetism. The magnetic field does no work. I can relate to that.
Magnetism. It’s more fun to say.
E. I’m satisfied, at a non-general relativist’s level, that v corss B is just relatively odd electric fields. And I don’t know what crack Lund is on, cause the way that it makes sense to talk about v cross B in a plasma is totally that v cross B is the electric field gained in switching out of a charge’s rest frame.
E. I’m satisfied, at a non-general relativist’s level, that v corss B is just relatively odd electric fields. And I don’t know what crack Lund is on, cause the way that it makes sense to talk about v cross B in a plasma is totally that v cross B is the electric field gained in switching out of a charge’s rest frame.
Magnetism.
It’s quite simple – Faraday rules.
Electricity. Because magnetism only holds my magnets on the refrigerator, which I don’t really care about, but electricity is pretty and makes my hairdryer work!
Unicorns!
ELECTRICITY!!!!!
Cause watching a spark come out is cooler than seeing an invisible force attracting/repelling. Also,it makes my computer work, which I can’t live without. 🙂