What do you know about magnets?

How important are they for us on this planet?

What makes them unique?

lodestones "magnetite" Ferromagnetite

with polarized ions can occur naturally or be made artificially by winding copper wire round a piece of steel and passing a DC current through it (geeky)

Same sides on a two magnets will repel each other...lol I know sad but I don't know much about magnets...lol

wow didn't know that. Very interesting

hey that is not bad okay

If you run a magnet along your computer tower or laptop, it will grab your datas and not give them back to, also makes the tv/monitor do weird stuff. I wouldn't recomend trying it, as it will mess things up permanetly.

NO way!

What I use to do as a teenager is rub a magnet on a video game machine at a video arcade center. By rubbing the magnet at the right spot had given me free games to play. Like over 50 free games!

Back then a game had cost me 25 cents. So do that math and we saved some money.

I was so good at it that I even had people pay me 2 or 3 dollars for the free games each time

Unfortunately the video arcade got smart and they put a wooden board inside that didn't allow us to rub a magnet on the side to get free games

The things we did as young teenagers

The electromagnetic spectrum is a wondrous thing.

Certain materials lend themselves to being highly magnetic. Originally magnets where only found in nature and very rarely. The first magnets where composed of magnetite. The greeks called them tzhu shih or loving stone, or attracting stone.

Magnus magnes ipse est globus terrestris
The whole of the earth is a magnet.

Its thought that Thales a greek philosopher in the sixth century B.C was the first person to discovered the amazing properties of magnetite.

The first purposeful use of the material was in the making compasses. This single item changed the face of the world for human beings. Navigation some 2,500 years later still makes use of magnets.

Magnets are used in more modern technology then I care to detail, the electromagnetic spectrum is manipulated using the same principles in nearly every type of technology used today.

I will continue later when I have more time.

Very good stuff you give us. Thank you

I always knew the compass had a magnet on it. Wasn't it the Chinesse or Mongolians who made use of it first? I saw it on a Marco Polo movie once. I always found it ironic that it points north for us.

Very interesting please do continue

The earth spins and since the core of the Earth is a combination of solid and liquid iron, the spin imparts a magnetic field around the earth. This effect is similar to the way the alternator works in your car. This magnetic field (seen as the Northern lights) traps and deflects cosmic rays that would kill most (if not all) life on earth.

Very lucky for that to happen that is for sure.

Neodymium magnets are fun just gotta watch yer fingers around em :P

Been collecting em outta hard drives for there size those lil suckers are hard to pull apart.

The northern lights are actually ionization occuring in the atmosphere due to high energy particles not from cosmic rays but from solar winds. Right concept wrong source.

A magnetosphere is a highly magnetized region around and possessed by an astronomical object. Earth is surrounded by a magnetosphere, as are the magnetized planets Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter's moon Ganymede is magnetized, but too weak to trap solar wind plasma. Mars has patchy surface magnetization. The term magnetosphere has also been used to describe regions dominated by the magnetic fields of celestial objects, e.g. pulsar magnetospheres.

Fascinating read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere

Indeed. Thanks for sharing this

I can't believe no one did mention a magnet based perpetum mobile or a free energy generator yet.

Not familiar with those, I don't think. Magnets are a integral part of most all motors. And most all power generating stations.

I was fascinated by magnetism as a child. It seems miraculous. Action at a distance without physically touching.

Of course, this isn't any different from gravity in that respect. In fact as I became more educated in scientific ideas I began to realized that magnetism truly is very similar to gravity (albeit different).

Both gravity and magnetism result from the warping of "feilds". As esoteric as this may sound, magnetism is not a property that an object possesses, but instead it's an effect that an object has on the fields in which it exists.

I realize that this may seem like an almost insignificant point, but it makes far more sense when applied to electromagnetic radiation which is is the propagation of these warps in the electromagnetic fields.

In other words, magnetism can and does exist in a totally free state apart from any material object. When a material object appears to be "magnetic" it's only because that object is warping the magnetic fields around it.

Like I say this sounds rather esoteric, but for me it's a very concrete concept that explains a lot of things.

It's not unlike Newton's discovery that all of the colors arise from light. Again that might not sound significant. But what it means is that there is no color in any object. Color is not a property of an object. The property that the object has is the ability to absorb, reflect, or emit light at various frequencies. But it is ultimately the light that has the property of color.

Again, this may seem trivial to many people, but from a mathematical perspective it's a profound realization that makes a huge difference in how easily the world can be precisely described in beautiful and elegant ways.

three things are required to generate electricity

a magnetic field

a conductor

and relative motion of the conductor throught the magnetic field