- Albert Einstein
What happens to, say, nuclear spin systems in strong magnetic fields is governed by the relevant equations, but may have little to do with expectations born of your daily experience -- unless and until your daily experience includes lots of nuclear magnetic resonance!
It's fun to learn how physical systems behave, and why, but it's perhaps especially fun when phenomena that formerly would have violated your idea of common sense, begin to seem, well, sensible.
Phenomena such as:
- negative absolute temperature;
- magnetic resonance images with spatial resolution orders of magnitude finer than the wavelength of the radio-frequency signals used in their formation (in apparent violation of the well-known diffraction limit on image resolution);
- (more fundamentally) the force pulling together a pair of uncharged metal plates.
Like Popper, I believe that great joy can come when our common sense is changed by our experiences:
"One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in, and of our incredible role in it."
- Karl Popper
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