this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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Think about it. Isn't light+eyes and ears+sound just the same in terms of their "influence at a distance"? We don't feel that as abnormal or magic - simply because we've sensors for them and are used to it. But physically speaking light and magnetism are based on electromagnetic forces.

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[–] Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

because we don't have biological sensors for it

Honestly. The evidence for or against this is still far from certain.

New evidence for a human magnetic sense that lets your brain detect the Earth’s magnetic field

[–] swnt@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair point, I didn't know about that. But even then, most of us don't feel like we can feel it - and in the modern city living spaces it gets even less important to train such a sense.

[–] oo1@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

source of sorts

Earth's field is very large and very weak compared to small strong household magnets.

Whatever senses we've evolved for navigation could be dealing in a completely different scales so as to be useless.

It might be like trying to use a 5ml teaspoon to measure the volume liquid in a of a bathtub.
or using an alcohol thermometer to measure the temperature of molten iron