Question: How do magnets work?

Pete Etchells answered on 2 Jul 2012:

Great question! Magnets work because they produce a magnetic field – very basically, this is an invisible force that either pulls (attracts) magnetic materials towards it, or pushes (repels) them away. These fields come about due to the movement of electric charges in the magnetic material.

If you think of an atom, it has a positively-charged nucleus, and is surrounded by negatively-charged electrons. The electrons have a property called ‘spin’, which determines which direction they orbit the nucleus in, and it’s this movement that causes the atom to have a magnetic charge. In a lot of elements, atoms have a pairs of electrons orbiting with spins that cancel each other out, which means that there is no overall direction of electron movement, and so there is no magnetic effect. In things like Iron though, there are odd numbers of electrons, which means there is a residual direction of electron movement and so a magnetic field arises. For each individual atom, this magnetic field is pretty weak – but if you get billions and billions of atoms together and line up the direction of their magnetic fields, you get a magnet!