The Electromagnetic Force of Fridge Magnets
Typically fridge magnets are made of ferrite, which is ferrimagnetic, not ferromagnetic, as has been known since 01948; though, if you recycle some hard-disk voice-coil magnets, you will have truly ferromagnetic fridge magnets.<p>And this illustrates a problem with <i>all</i> of these explanations: none of them is precise enough to yield falsifiable predictions.  (The fact that this one is <i>wrong</i> is, by comparison, minor.  Incorrect reasoning from evidence can be corrected.  Erroneous observations can be corrected with correct observations.  But vague explanations can always be lawyered to fit the evidence.)  Although these explanations are written with scientific words, they are not scientific explanations; they belong to the same genre as Kipling&#x27;s Just So Stories or quantum-healing pseudoscience.<p>Or, in some cases, Life Hacks: if you drip drops of water on your &quot;hob&quot; and they just sit there because it&#x27;s an induction &quot;hob&quot;, you&#x27;ve at least empirically validated that you don&#x27;t see the Leidenfrost effect.  (Let&#x27;s hope you know how to reseason your cast-iron skillet after you successfully reproduce the Leidenfrost effect on that.)  But you&#x27;ll never be able to <i>falsify</i> the Leidenfrost effect working from this bullshit picture, because it could always just be that your &quot;hob&quot; isn&#x27;t hot enough; to have a <i>falsifiable</i> prediction, you&#x27;d need to know that water&#x27;s Leidenfrost point is 193°C normally, but can be as high as 210° or as low as 150° depending on circumstances.  If you have your skillet at 250° and water drops are still not floating around in a spooky way, you have falsified the prediction.  (The text, &quot;When a liquid is on a surface hotter than its boiling point, drops float on a layer of vapor,&quot; could be read as claiming that the Leidenfrost point is the same temperature as the boiling point, which is wrong.)<p>Science is what comes with a demonstration.<p>How would you tell, for example, if your cake is frothing up because of Charles&#x27;s Law, because water is vaporizing, because dissolved gas is coming out of solution, because baking soda is being decomposed by heat, or because baking soda is being neutralized by an acid?   How would you tell if your saliva is missing amylase, or your bread is missing starch?  It&#x27;s possible to do it, but you need more than a Just So Story that says &quot;fluffy texture&quot; or &quot;aids digestion&quot;.<p>What&#x27;s worse is the kind of &quot;science&quot; classes that consist of memorizing and regurgitating this kind of discourse; essentially the exams are testing your ability to memorize (or guess) the teacher&#x27;s password, reducing science to the level of slogan-shouting politics.  Feynman had a wonderful story about how this disease had taken over the Brazilian university system, to the point that his physics students were surprised that sunlight reflected off the ocean was polarized.<p>I think this kind of &quot;science&quot; popularization is to blame for the rise of quantum healing and the like (not to mention the devastation of the curent pandemic, as I sort of argue in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28332889" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28332889</a>).  Once you remove the evidence and empirical grounding from a scientific explanation, you can&#x27;t expect the vulgar to magically intuit that the evidence is really there, behind the scenes; they won&#x27;t be able to tell the difference from Deepak Chopra bullshit.<p>Because the difference is the part that&#x27;s been intentionally left out.