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Comment by mrybczyn | Hacker News Reader

Well.... I'm pretty sure the field interpretation of EM also applies across the universe. So you could, on a dark night, with the electrons in the atoms of your body, feel the movement of electrons in a star, millions of light years away in space and time...

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Yeah, but the electrons in the star are pushing on your electrons, not pulling. I think bluetwo called gravity romantic because it is bringing together, not driving apart.

I hesitate to say this because I dont entirely grasp it at the moment but I think when electrons are travelling parallel to each other they can stop repelling... their repulsive force is overtly effected by their relative movement, as well as their position and charge - due to how charges in motion modify and follow the magnetic field.

I believe that if we were just dealing with electrons, the repulsion from the electric field would be much much stronger than the attraction from the magnetic field.

We only see a net attraction between current carrying parallel wires because the wires contain both electrons and protons in almost perfect balance, so that the electron/electron repulsions and proton/proton repulsions between the wires are almost perfectly canceled by the electron/proton attractions between the wires, leaving no net electrical attraction or repulsion.

That lets the weak magnetic attractions (or repulsions, depending on the directions of the currents) dominate.

That interpretation is entirely valid, but the fact that objects can be electrically neutral mitigates the magnitude of that effect substantially.

Neutral is a tricky thing. Composite particles aren't truly neutral..just like gravity isn't really from point sources but can be considered as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truly_neutral_particle

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