Magnetic Attraction
By: Seeker
So electricity is an unknown to us. Magnetism is even a stranger thing. Like electric charge, it comes in two flavours, called north and south. Like electricity, opposites attract and like repels.
Magnetism shows action at a distance to an even greater extent than does electricity. Both produce fields around them and even those fields are a mystery. Move a wire through a magnetic field and you can get current flow – that’s exactly how we generate electricity in a generator. But what precisely IS a magnetic line of force? We see them at the sun’s surface, as gigantic loops of plasma surge along the twisted magnetic lines reach the surface; when such lines of force ‘snap’ like a whip, they spray vast amounts of charged particles across the solar system in what are called solar flares.
Magnetism seems to defy the energy equation by performing work with no apparent using up of the force doing the work. If we set up two magnets near each other on springs so that the north poles face each other and can’t swing away from facing each other, the slightest push on one will start an oscillation that can continue for longer than we might be willing to wait for it to stop.
And we can keep doing it, over and over – although it’s magnetism doing the work of pushing the other north pole away, it never seems to get used up. Strange stuff. And there’s two guys (both now dead unfortunately) who have made things even stranger by showing ways to use electricity and magnetism in ways that nobody else can duplicate.
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