Magnets and Magnetism

A magnet is a piece of rock or metal that can pull other metals towards it. The force of magnets is
called

magnetism.

Together

with gravity and electricity it

is

basic

force of

nature.

Early

humans discovered magnets and magnetism thousands of years ago. They found out that certain types of
rock, called loadstone, pulled iron and other metal objects towards it. After some time they found out that
thin pieces of such a rock would always point in one direction if you hung it on a piece of thread. The ends
of such a metal are the poles of a magnet. All magnets have a magnetic field around them, the force between
the two poles. Magnets attract or repel other metals. This is because every magnet has two poles: a north and
a south pole. North and south poles attract each other but two north poles or two south poles push each other
apart.
Our planet is also a big magnet with a North and a South Pole. But the Earths magnetic poles are not
in the same place as the geographic poles. The magnetic North Pole, for example, is in northern Canada.
Compasses always point to the magnetic poles, not to the geographic ones.
Magnetism comes from electrons, the tiny particles that fly around the nucleus of an atom. They are
negatively charged and produce a very weak magnetic field. When many of these electrons point
towards the same direction they can pull metals to them.
It is also possible to make a magnet by taking an existing one and rubbing another piece of metal with
it. If you keep rubbing the new piece of metal in the same direction its electrons will start to point in
that direction, thus creating a new magnet.
If a magnet keeps its magnetic field all the time we call it a permanent magnet. However, not all magnets
are permanent. Some objects become magnets only when electricity passes through them. They are called
electromagnets. There are many examples of such electromagnets in everyday life: car motors, railway
signals, loudspeakers.

A History of Magnetism
The ancient Greeks, originally those near the city of Magnesia, and also the early Chinese knew about
strange and rare stones (possibly chunks of iron ore struck by lightning) with the power to attract iron. A
steel needle stroked with such a "lodestone" became "magnetic" as well, and around 1000 the Chinese
found that such a needle, when freely suspended, pointed north-south.
The magnetic compass soon spread to Europe. Columbus used it when he crossed the Atlantic ocean,
noting not only that the needle deviated slightly from exact north (as indicated by the stars) but also that the
deviation changed during the voyage. Around 1600 William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth I of
England, proposed an explanation: the Earth itself was a giant magnet, with its magnetic poles some
distance away from its geographic ones (i.e. near the points defining the axis around which the Earth turns).
The Magnetosphere
On Earth one needs a sensitive needle to detect magnetic forces, and out in space they are usually much,
much weaker. But beyond the dense atmosphere, such forces have a much bigger role, and a region exists
around the Earth where they dominate the environment, a region known as the Earth's magnetosphere.
That region contains a mix of electrically charged particles, and electric and magnetic phenomena rather
than gravity determine its structure. We call it the Earth's magnetosphere
Only a few of the phenomena observed on the ground come from the magnetosphere: fluctuations of the
magnetic field known as magnetic storms and substorms, and the polar aurora or "northern lights,"
appearing in the night skies of places like Alaska and Norway. Satellites in space, however, sense much
more: radiation belts, magnetic structures, fast streaming particles and processes which energize them. All
these are described in the sections that follow.
But what is magnetism?
Until 1821, only one kind of magnetism was known, the one produced by iron magnets. Then a Danish
scientist, Hans Christian Oersted, while demonstrating to friends the flow of an electric current in a wire,
noticed that the current caused a nearby compass needle to move. The new phenomenon was studied in
France by Andre-Marie Ampere, who concluded that the nature of magnetism was quite different from
what everyone had believed. It was basically a force between electric currents: two parallel currents in
the same direction attract, in oposite directions repel. Iron magnets are a very special case, which Ampere
was also able to explain.

What Oersted saw...

In nature, magnetic fields are produced in the rarefied gas of space, in the glowing heat of sunspots and
in the molten core of the Earth. Such magnetism must be produced by electric currents, but finding how
those currents are produced remains a major challenge.
Magnetic Field Lines
Michael Faraday, credited with fundamental discoveries on electricity and magnetism (an electric unit is
named "Farad" in his honor), also proposed a widely used method for visualizing magnetic fields. Imagine

a compass needle freely suspended in three dimensions, near a magnet or an electrical current. We can
trace in space (in our imagination, at least!) the lines one obtains when one "follows the direction of the
compass needle." Faraday called them lines of force, but the term field lines is now in common use.
Field lines of a bar magnet are commonly illustrated by iron filings sprinkled on a sheet of paper held over
a magnet. Similarly, field lines of the Earth start near the south pole of the Earth, curve around in space and
converge again near the north pole.
However, in the Earth's magnetosphere, currents also flow through space and modify this pattern: on the
side facing the Sun, field lines are compressed earthward, while on the night side they are pulled out into a
very long "tail," like that of a comet. Near Earth, however, the lines remain very close to the "dipole
pattern" of a bar magnet, so named because of its two poles.
To Faraday field lines were mainly a method of displaying the structure of the magnetic force. In space
research, however, they have a much broader significance, because electrons and ions tend to stay attached
to them, like beads on a wire, even becoming trapped when conditions are right. Because of this
attachment, they define an "easy direction" in the rarefied gas of space, like the grain in a piece of wood, a
direction in which ions and electrons, as well as electric currents (and certain radio-type waves), can easily
move; in contrast, motion from one line to another is more difficult.
A map of the magnetic field lines of the magnetosphere, like the one displayed above (from a mathematical
model of the field), tells at a glance how different regions are linked and many other important properties.
Electromagnetic Waves
Faraday not only viewed the space around a magnet as filled with field lines, but also developed an
intuitive (and perhaps mystical) notion that such space was itself modified, even if it was a complete
vacuum. His younger contemporary, the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, placed this notion
on a firm mathematical footing, including in it electrical forces as well as magnetic ones. Such a modified
space is now known as an electromagnetic field.
Today electromagnetic fields (and other types of field as well) are a cornerstone of physics. Their basic
equations, derived by Maxwell, suggested that they could undergo wave motion, spreading with the speed
of light, and Maxwell correctly guessed that this actually was light and that light was in fact an
electromagnetic wave.
Heinrich Hertz in Germany, soon afterwards, produced such waves by electrical means, in the first
laboratory demonstration of radio waves. Nowadays a wide variety of such waves is known, from radio
(very long waves, relatively low frequency) to microwaves, infra-red, visible light, ultra-violet, x-rays and
gamma rays (very short waves, extremely high frequency).
Radio waves produced in our magnetosphere are often modified by their environment and tell us about
the particles trapped there. Other such waves have been detected from the magnetospheres of distant
planets, the Sun and the distant universe. X-rays, too, are observed to come from such sources and are the
signatures of high-energy electrons there.
Magnetism and electricity
In the 1700s scientists discovered that magnetism and electricity had similar features. Just like
magnets have two poles, electricity has positive and negative charges. A positive and a negative
charge attract each other and two negative or two positive charges repel each other.
After they had found this out they started making useful tools and machines with the help
of electricity and magnetism. The Danish physicist Oersted sent electricity through a wire and put a compass

near it. To his surprise the compass needle moved. Soon after that the first electromagnet was made by
making a wire into a coil and sending electricity through it.
Use of magnets
The first magnetic instruments were compasses which sailors used to guide them on their journeys.
Today, magnets can be found in many areas of everyday life. They are in washing machines, hold doors shut
and work in generators and electric motors. Credit cards have magnetic strips on them that give you
financial

information.

Magnetic

audio

and videotapes as

well

as

disks

have

many tiny

magnetic particles which are used to store sounds, pictures and other information.
In medicine a magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) can create exact pictures of organs
and bones inside the human body. It is much better and more exact than X-rays .
Powerful electromagnets are attached to big cranes that can move iron and steel. In some parts of the world
trains travel on tracks that are magnetized. These trains, called maglev, are lifted above the tracks and do
not have any contact with them. They travel at speeds of up to 480 km an hour.

Magnets in animals
Scientists have also discovered that some animals, like pigeons, dolphins and turtles may have some
magnetic particles in their body. They are able to detect the Earths magnetic field and find out their location.