YGOLANA|ANALOGY

A blog about analogies found on the web.

Magnet is like Vuvuzela

Ever wondered how does magnet work? After the World Cup there is hardly anyone who wouldn't know vuvuzela. So, let's use vuvuzela to explain the principle of magnetism, shall we?
Imagine, if you will, a crowd bearing vuvuzelas. Individuals in this crowd can blow their vuvuzelas in any direction they please, however much we might wish they didn't. In a ferromagnet groups of vuvuzela players spotting their neighbours spontaneously face the same direction to play their devilish instruments. The whole crowd may not be blowing them in the same direction but groups of them will. They can be marshalled to all blow their horns in the same direction by a band leader, and once pointing in the same direction they will continue to face that way, even in the absence of the band leader.
The individuals in this group are atoms in a material, and the vuvuzelas represent the magnetic field of a single atom. Groups of players facing in the same direction represent magnetic domains and the band leader represents an applied magnetic field. The point about ferromagnets is they massively enhance an a magnetic field applied by something like a coil of wire with a current flowing through it - this is how you make an electromagnet. The difference between a "magnet" and any old bit of ferromagnet is that in a "magnet" all the domains have been lined up to face the same way.
In paramagnetic materials vuvuzelas players ignore their neighbours and play away in random directions, they respond in a somewhat feeble fashion to the directions of the band leader.
In diamagnetic materials the crowd have no vuvuzelas but use their hands as a substitute, rather petulantly they face the opposite direction to that proposed by the band leader. In scientific language the hands represent induced magnetic dipole moments.
Read the full article here.

Proton is like Blueberry Muffin


The proton is a subatomic particle with an electric charge of +1 elementary charge. It is found in the nucleus of each atom, along withneutrons, but is also stable by itself and has a second identity as the hydrogen ion, H+. It is composed of three fundamental particles: twoup quarks and one down quark.

And here is blueberry muffin analogy:

So, you can think of a proton as something like a blueberry muffin: The two u's and the d are like the blueberries, the blueness that stains the dough around them is like the pairs of additional quarks and anti-quarks that pop out, and the dough itself is the cloud of gluons that holds the whole thing together. Unlike a muffin, however, this sea of particles isn't static. It is constantly bubbling and rolling as new quark/anti-quark pairs are created and annihilated, emitting and absorbing gluons and pushing the extra u's and d all around inside. Of course, we can only see this when you look really close, which is what our accelerators let us do.