I just deleted the post about “Iran’s future and why it matters” because I don’t think anyone gives a shit, to replace it with this post, because everyone at some time has wondered how magnets work. I have, all my life, and I finally put the pieces together and figured it out a few weeks ago.
Modern physics bears me out, as do several major, publicly accessible AIs. In case you’re wondering, I’m a sort of armchair physicist. Mathematics are not my thing, philosophy and the ability to visualize are my tools in exploring and understanding our world, and delving into the Alcubierre Warp Drive Metric is what provided the path to the answer. Give credit where it’s due.
It’s all about Resonance. Physicists have found that all forms of energy operate within frequency ranges. Light, for instance. It was the discovery of how to make light resonate within a “cavity” that created lasers. This, by the way, is exactly how RADAR works, as I learned when in the US Navy. When energy resonates within a cavity, called, of course, a “resonant cavity” because the physical dimensions of the cavity correspond to the wave length at resonance, this allows the resonating energy to accumulate within the cavity. Then a burst of energy is inserted, forcing out the accumulated energy as a pulse.
All energy forms are related under one set of rules except for the Strong Nuclear Force, which I won’t get into here, and this is why magnets make electricity, electricity makes magnets, generates heat, generates light, radio waves and so on. It all starts with atoms.
Atoms, composed of three basic particles, have a collective frequency which is the combined frequency of its particles. ( I have to insert here that “particles” is just an expression for points of energy. All “matter” is composed of points of energy.) What binds atoms together is the resonance of these frequencies with each other. Atomic particles, Protons, Neutrons and Electrons, all have resonate frequencies that bind with each other. It really helps if you can visualize this, so think about three people with beautiful, strong voices who are singing a song, one carries the basic tune and the two others start harmonizing. Suddenly the sound has more force, more solidity, it pulls you in. Now imagine a dozen singers, singing in harmony. Just as it is with human hearing, resonance is an attractive force in atomic structure and all energy forms including sound have points of resonance.
Resonance combines energies and locks them together and at the atomic level where everything is pure energy, cancelling resonance is what releases that energy. It seems vast to us, the amount of energy of an atomic bomb that results from such a small amount of explosive material, but it’s not, that’s just our comparison of it to lesser chemical reactions.
Now to Magnets and Iron, which is the magnetic material we’re most familiar with. All elements have their inherent properties, gold is a soft metal that never oxidizes, chromium is an extremely hard and brittle metal, oxygen readily combines with most other elements, and so on. Iron atoms have the ability to re-align in a polar manner in the presence of an energy field. I think this is an inherent property caused by their specific field combination of protons, neutrons and electrons but I haven’t really focused on that and I’m not sure, so don’t quote me. In any case, if you induce an electric current in a piece of iron, it will magnetize, or if you rub a piece of iron, like a needle, with a magnet, it will magnetize the needle.
What happens is all the atoms polarize under the influence of the applied energy field. Think of billions of spinning gyroscopes all perfectly aligned with each other, their axes all pointing in exactly the same direction and all of their energy fields resonantly locked together and radiating in the same direction along the axis and you then can see why magnets do what they do. The combined field is almost infinitely greater than that which one iron atom produces.
When a magnet comes near iron, its field begins resonating with the fields of atoms in the iron and this resonating increases as distance decreases and more of the magnet’s field is able to interact with the iron and the mutual polar alignments increase. The atoms are pulled tightly toward each other through resonant attraction. Simple as that.