Context preview

Electromagnetism Secretly Runs the World

A limited preview of the context Palate can cite when answering questions from Trevor McFedries.

User uploadsMar 24, 2026Public source

Document preview

Source: co/p/electromagnetism-secretly-runs-the Published: 2026-03-24T12:57:34.000Z Summary: A Co-Written Essay with Arena Physica CEO Pratap [Image 1: Not Boring by Packy png) Subscribe Sign [Image 2: User's jpeg) Discover more from Not Boring by Packy McCormick Tech strategy, analysis, and philosophy, but not boring. Over 266,000 subscribers Subscribe By subscribing, you agree Substack's Terms of Use, and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy. Already have an account? Sign in Mar 24, 2026 198 3 15 Share _Welcome to the **520 newly Not Boring people** who have joined us since our last essay! Join**260,690** smart, curious folks by subscribing here:_

Subscribe * * * Hi friends 👋, Happy Tuesday! Welcome to our newest installment in what has become an unintentional two-part series on non-LLM models that can do things that humans can’t, things that will give us superhuman abilities in the physical world. They’re also both co-written with founders you’d expect to find in SF but are building right here in the greatest city in the world, NYC. The first was last week’s essay on World Models with Pim de Witte. Today’s is about machines that can intuit electromagnetic fields in a way almost no humans can that will help us design and build better electromagnetic (EM) systems.

As you know, I’m very bullish on the growing role of electromagnetic systems in the economy. After Sam and I wrote _The Electric Slide_, Arena Physica CEO Pratap Ranade and I traded emails. In one of them, he wrote: > _The electrical and electromagnetic components are the “nervous system” of modern hardware and contribute to 40-50% of failures. Our ability as a nation to test and build it has declined, but –– imo even bigger –– as a species, we’re still unable to wield electromagnetism to its full _ Over the past seven months, we’ve developed a friendship, and Pratap has broken my brain many times.

One of the things that’s most fascinated me is the idea he’s betting his company on, the one he emailed me about: humans can’t intuit EM, and it’s a bottleneck to the electric progress we both want to see. There’s no reason machines can’t be taught to understand them much better than we can, though. For the past few years, Arena has been building AI tools and deploying expert electrical and RF engineers to help companies design, develop, and debug electromagnetic hardware. They’re working with companies including AMD, Anduril, and Sivers Semiconductors. They are backed by investors including Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Initialized (Garry Tan), Shield Capital, and 137 Ventures.

Today, they’re re-branding as Arena Physica with the expanded mission to develop “Electromagnetic ” This is an essay about how to teach machines to see the fields that we can’t, and what the world might look like if we can. Let’s get to it. * * [Image png) _Normally, our sponsors would like me to tell you why you should give them your hard-earned money. This time, Deel has asked me to tell you how they can give YOU money in The _ _Deel recently launched a global tournament with $15M in prizes for startups: the top 10 get a $1M investment each, and 100 regional winners will get $50k.

You don’t need warm intros and you don’t need to pay to apply. It’s just a pure competition for the best _ _Pitch in just two minutes for the chance to win a $1M investment, access to a global ecosystem designed to help you scale (partners and sponsors include Stripe, Google, AWS, and a16z), and to get your startup in front of global leaders. This is your _ Apply Now * * [Image png) Electromagnetism secretly runs our world. “Secretly,” because only a few people on this planet can intuit how it works. Your phone’s GPS is powered by satellites that broadcast electromagnetic (EM) waves with timestamps.

The wi-fi in your apartment is created by EM waves bouncing around the walls. Air traffic control is radar, as in EM waves that pulse out and listen for echoes off aircraft. When Maverick locks onto a bogey in Top Gun, he’s using a phased array radar steering EM beams electronically. Contactless payment? EM. Microwave oven? EM. The fiber optic cables carrying the internet across the ocean floor and through Somos’ network? That’s light… which is also EM. Every single wireless signal, medical image, radar sweep, every chip talking to another chip inside a data center.

All of it is electromagnetic waves, shaped and directed by physical structures designed to manipulate these waves. And, as electricity and intelligence race to define our era, EM’s presence is only growing more pronounced. In our data centers, chips communicate with each other via short-range EM waves. If Elon successfully moves the data centers to space, AI will be beamed down from satellites to your device via EM waves. As Packy and Sam wrote in _The Electric Slide_, everything that can economically go electric will. Cars, trucks, buses, drones, boats, stoves, heat pumps, batteries, bikes, even planes, anything that moves, heats, lights, computes, or converts energy is moving from mechanical to electric.

All of those newly electric things will be full of EM components. In 1970, electronics accounted for five percent of a new car’s cost, on average. By 2020, that number reached forty percent. By 2030, it’s anticipated that the cost of the electronics of a consumer automotive vehicle will reach fifty percent of the vehicle cost. Electronics comprise 35% of the cost of the F35 Lightning II, more than the cost of the engine itself, and 15% of the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine, which costs $20 million.

By the 2030s, when it’s projected that defense contractors will be building the F-47, they’ll be spending over 40% of the $300 million airframe on electronics. This is good. We want to see this electrification continue. Electric machines perform better with less impact on the environment, give us capabilities combustion engines can’t, are better-suited for autonomy, and are riding cost/performance curves that will continue to widen the advantage. But among a number of challenges addressed in _The Electric Slide_ particularly as it relates to production _,_ there’s an equally large one looming in the research and development of new and better electromagnetic machines: **our electromagnetic capabilities are bottlenecked by the very small number of humans who actually understand how any of this

** There is a reason radiofrequency (RF) engineering — the practice of designing hardware that shapes and directs EM waves — is often referred to as **black magic**. There are maybe ten people in the world who can deeply intuit electromagnetism, who can see which shapes will create which EM fields in their mind’s eye 1. I am not one of those people, but I’ve met them. I’m hiring them at my company, Arena Physica, and I went to school with many of them. There was a guy in my physics program about whom our professor asked, “You know what’s special about this

” We all said no. **“This guy thinks like an ”** What he meant was that, electrons, if they were sentient, would feel all of these different fields pulling at them. Electrons would probably have an intuition for this feeling, the same way we have an intuitive feel for gravity, how we just know that when we let go of a ball, it will drop to the ground. Those friends of our ancestors’ who couldn’t intuit gravity did not live long enough to reproduce. Some people – a vanishingly small number – have spent enough time studying, testing, designing, and simulating electromagnetic systems to be able to intuit them like gravity.

But for the rest of us, electromagnetism is mostly invisible. For the vast majority of human history, we haven’t needed to see beyond the visible spectrum in order to survive. And so we haven’t. Those of our ancestors’ friends who wasted precious resources on seeing the full spectrum of EM waves wouldn’t have lived to pass on these traits, either. Humans can see a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the “visible light” portion with wavelengths between 400 nanometers (violet) and 700 nanometers (red). We don’t see shorter wavelengths (ultraviolet light, X-rays, or gamma rays) or longer wavelengths (infrared, microwave, or radio

[Image png) _Datacolor_ This has served us just fine. Until electromagnetism came to run the world. We have a fundamental force that we rely deeply on, but one that very few of us can work with naturally. This slows technological progress and limits what we can make. Fortunately, AI doesn’t share our blind spots. It is particularly good at seeing patterns, at making connections and understanding dependencies that are not necessarily intuitive to humans. Because of this, we believe that computers will be much better at grasping electromagnetism than we are. We should be able to build a **Large Field Model (LFM)** — like an LLM that generalizes across language, except ours generalizes across EM.

We should be able to use this LFM to understand EM waves and shape them to do what we’d like them to do. That’s the big bet we’re making at Arena Physica. To understand why we’re making it, I want to first make sure you understand electromagnetism. Packy and Sam gave A Brief History of Electromagnetism in _The Electric _ I’m going to add to that with A Brief _Primer_ on Electromagnetism. I’ll sprinkle in relevant history, but my goal is to make sure we have a working understanding of electromagnetism. There are four fundamental forces that govern how everything in our universe works:

1. Strong force 2. Weak force 3. Gravity 4. Electromagnetism The **strong force** and **weak force** operate at subatomic scales. The strong force binds protons and neutrons together in atomic nuclei. The weak force enables radioactive decay and nuclear fusion. **Gravity** is the weakest of the four forces by an enormous margin (roughly 10 36 times weaker than electromagnetism). Yet, it dominates at cosmic scales. It only attracts, never repels, which means its forces keep adding up. And it acts on every single particle with mass or energy. It’s also mysterious at a fundamental level: gravity and quantum theory are incredibly powerful theories for how our world works, but they are fundamentally incompatible.

This remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in physics. But we have a strong, intuitive relationship with gravity. In our day-to-day lives, we can _feel_ the force. **Electromagnetism** is the force we interact with most directly in everyday life. It’s also the one we’ve industrialized most aggressively. It governs light, electricity, magnetism, and chemistry, essentially everything about how matter behaves above the nuclear scale. It’s why matter has structure, why chemistry works, and why technology works. It’s responsible for the structure of atoms (electrons bound to nuclei), the bonds between molecules, the rigidity of solid objects, and all electronics and communication technology.

Unlike gravity, electromagnetism has both positive and negative charges, which means it can attract or repel, and large accumulations tend to neutralize themselves.

Open original