Question: How do magnets work

Jess Wade answered on 19 Jun 2015:

Ooft! Tough. Magnets are a bit like gravity- they attract one another- but differently to gravity, they can repel each other too. They’ve been around for ages- we’ve used magnets in compasses to navigate the globe. Ancient greeks and romans used iron, and the ancient chinese made magnetic compasses. To ancient people, magnetism must have seemed like magic. For magnetic materials like iron, it is the arrangement of charges and electrons that cause them to be magnetic. Magnetism is like an invisible force created by electrical currents, created from moving electrons inside the magnetic materials. Here’s somethings we know:

Magnets have two poles, a north and south pole. North poles attract south poles, and repel north poles. magnets feel each other in things called magnetic fields
The ‘north’ pole of magnets points towards the earth’s north because the earth has magnetic materials inside and behave like giant magnets. If we cut a magnet in half, they are still magnets with a north and south pole. We can make materials magnetic by moving a magnetic material over them (like magnetising a paper clip).