Why Magnetism Is an Illusion | Leonard Susskind скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Magnetism Is an Illusion | Leonard Susskind

Magnets are everywhere. We stick notes to refrigerators, watch compass needles swing toward north, and barely give it a second thought. But this casual familiarity conceals something far stranger than most people realize. Magnetism isn't just another force of nature — it's a window into the quantum foundation of reality itself. In this lecture, renowned theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind reveals why the simple explanation you learned in school misses the deeper truth about what magnets actually are and how they really work. The magnetic force doesn't come from anything physical moving between objects. There's no substance flowing through space, no mechanical explanation that makes sense in everyday terms. Instead, magnetism emerges from quantum mechanics in its purest form — from the intrinsic spin of electrons, a property that has no classical counterpart and exists only in the quantum realm. This isn't a minor detail. It's the foundation of everything. Without quantum spin and the Pauli exclusion principle, atoms couldn't form, chemistry wouldn't exist, and solid matter would collapse. Magnetism is deeply woven into the fabric of how our universe operates. Susskind explains how magnetism reveals the connection between electricity and relativity, why opposite poles attract at the quantum level, and what magnetic fields fundamentally are. Through clear reasoning and profound insights, he traces the phenomenon from everyday refrigerator magnets to the symmetries and principles that govern physical reality. This is magnetism stripped of comfortable explanations, exposing the quantum strangeness that makes the familiar world possible. For anyone curious about what really lies beneath the surface of nature's most commonplace mystery.