John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Here's the kind of thing you need to suffer through, to understand this "polarization ...

Here's the kind of thing you need to suffer through, to understand this "polarization flip" stuff. None of it gets close to the exciting physics - it's just preliminary junk.

People say the Earth's magnetic field points *up* in Antarctica. This is just an arbitrary convention. There's also an arbitrary right-hand rule we need to figure out how the magnetic field pushes on electrons and positrons as they shoot down through the air. But these two arbitrary conventions cancel out and give a non-arbitrary prediction about which way the electrons get pushed, and which way the positrons get pushed.

I'm used to that. But on top of that, people say stuff like this:

"A magnetic compass does not point to the geographic north pole. A magnetic compass points to the earth's magnetic poles, which are not the same as earth's geographic poles."

Okay, fine. But then:

"Furthermore, the magnetic pole near earth's geographic north pole is actually the south magnetic pole. When it comes to magnets, opposites attract. This fact means that the north end of a magnet in a compass is attracted to the south magnetic pole, which lies close to the geographic north pole."

🥴

Okay....

https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/11/15/why-does-a-magnetic-compass-point-to-the-geographic-north-pole/