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A comment on What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube [video]. Parent comment

Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by vecter on Monday February 03, 2014 @06:55PM (#7174471)
Technically, this has nothing to do with the Right Hand Rule. That is just a human convention to assign a positive and negative signs to a particular direction. Electromagnetism doesn't care about our silly human notations.
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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by hnriot on Monday February 03, 2014 @07:25PM (#7174622)
semantics vs syntax - magnets don't have hands obviously, but the metaphor holds just the same.

There is no "technically..." nonsense! It's not a human convention either - it's an anthropomorphic metaphor.

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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by robotresearcher on Monday February 03, 2014 @08:29PM (#7174897)
Name another animal that uses that convention.
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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by nrivadeneira on Monday February 03, 2014 @10:34PM (#7175340)
The point is that it's not a convention - it's a metaphor, as hnriot pointed out.
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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by robotresearcher on Tuesday February 04, 2014 @06:13PM (#7180884)
It's not a metaphor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor

No one is comparing or likening charge to some other thing. We simply give opposing charge "directions" a name. Everyone uses the name. It's a convention.

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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by nrivadeneira on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @03:47PM (#7227146)
The comparison that is being made is the direction your thumb points when your fingers wrap in a particular direction. It's not merely giving it a name - it's specifically likening the vector to the relative orientation of your fingers. That's why the comparison is memorable. If it were merely a name with nothing that it is compared to, it would not be memorable nor helpful.
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Re:What Happens When You Drop A Magnet Inside A Copper Tube ... by calinet6 on Monday February 03, 2014 @07:18PM (#7174588)
It does, however, exhibit the properties we use language to describe. There's a kernel of truth at the center of it.
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