I just don’t want a permanent installation that’s going to be largely useless after my kid is old enough to use mechanical pencils.

>They make a good mechanical pencil too if you get sick of sharpening

I'm not sure why, but my kid's teacher won't allow mechanical pencils. I think it has something to do the the grip? I'm not sure. It seems like a dumb rule to me, but... rules are rules.

Honestly, zero. When I was in high school, I wanted to be a physics major in college, but I my math teacher told me I had no chance to ever learn the math necessary to do Physics, and it's just be a waste of my tuition money, so I abandoned that plan because I couldn't afford to fail my first year as a physics major and then need to change to a different program.

I've always kind of regretted my decision, and now I'm trying to self-study. I've been going through Taylor's Classical Mechanics, and basically picking up Calc and differential equations along the way as I go (I know, this is all a bad idea. Believe me, everybody has told me that I just have to take a bunch of math and make sure I'm 100% on that before I ever even look at a physics book, but I just can't do it. I hate math so much).

Taylor's Classical Mechanics is not exactly easy, but I felt like I was making some level of progress. I bought a used copy of Griffith's Electrodynamics because I found a used book store selling it for a really low price.

I'm confused now because I was trying to figure out what Maxwell's equations mean, and that took me to Stack Exchange, where somebody said that if we have a wave passing through the magnetic field, it induces an electrical field, and then that re-induces a magnetic field, which then self-propagates as the electrical wave makes a magnetic wave, and so on and so forth. We can this endless propagation a photon.

So then I thought, well wait that doesn't make sense. Because then moving a magnet through space would just make magnetic waves, and that would create photons? That makes no sense at all. But another comment said that photons are created by wave excitations in the EM field. Which sounds similar?

At that point I decided, okay I have no idea what is going on, I'd better ask.

And here we are.

That's all there is to it. I have no formal education at all. I'm just a humanities person who's in way over his head.

>You're trying to make sense of black holes before you make sense of the basic properties of the EM force. You need to slow down and try to get a better understanding of the basics before trying to understand what happens near a singularity.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm trying to make sense of EM force, but I'm finding it really, really confusing.

Okay. So, fundamentally, I am correct to say that if I have a permanent magnet (an iron magnet for example), and I constantly accelerate it very, very quickly (for example, I throw it into a black hole), it will emit EM radiation all the way down? Is that correct? Could I (theoretically) detect a magnet falling into a black hole by observing the radio waves it emits, and infer that a magnet must be falling into the black hole?

What happens to a black hole that's rotating if it has charge? Does it emit EM radiation? Intuitively, I think the answer is "no" because a black hole can't emit anything. So I think I'm misunderstanding things. Where am I going wrong?

Suppose the following:

I throw a permanent magnet (a chunk of iron or something) into a rotating black hole. The black hole has enormous mass, and it has to conserve angular momentum. So, as the chunk of iron falls into it, it should rotate. And if the magnet is very small, it should rotate very quickly (again, to conserve angular momentum).

My questions are:

1. As the magnet rotates, does it emits EM radiation?

2. If the magnet is emitting EM radiation, is it an antenna? Is it more-or-less a broadcast antenna that's powered by the black hole?

No I mean if I throw a permanent magnet into a black hole, is it an antenna? Because it’s radiating radio waves. Does that make it an antenna?

So is the magnet here an antenna?

Okay but fundamentally speaking, if I say rotate a magnet continually, it actually emits radio waves? That is… weird. I am tempted to ask why, but I know the answer is, because the math says it has to. But this makes no intuitive sense. At all.

So if I take a magnet, and I flip it into a charged black hole, it’s going to emit radio waves all the way until it gets to the event horizon? I don’t understand this at all.

So, what did we learn from sequencing the human genome?