Speaker 2
When a mommy magnet and a daddy magnet love each other very much.
Speaker 1
Yeah. So let's start, Thomas. What do you know about magnetism? How would
Speaker 2
you describe that? Literal magic that wizards invented. So
Speaker 1
basically that insane clown posse song, miracles, fucking magnets, how do they work? That's where you're at. Never heard of it,
Speaker 2
but fully agree with that message. Fully agree with the story. Okay. Yeah. I
Speaker 1
could have written that, apparently. Our everyday experience of magnets is their chunks of metal, which do a few things, all of which seem to be related. They have two ends which behave differently. We call them poles, like a magnet will have a North Pole and a South Pole. And if the magnet is able to move on its own, it will typically rotate to aligned with Earth's magnetic field so that the north pole of the magnet points south and the south pole of the magnet points north. And if you have two magnets, they'll do the same thing where the north pole of one will be attracted to the south pole of the other and vice versa. So magnets, opposites attract. Magnets will also tend to stick to a lot of metallic surfaces that aren't themselves magnetic. This is something we call induced magnetism. It basically temporarily turns other metals into a magnet and then sticks to them because of that. So magnets are an attractive or repulsive force depending on how they're aligned.
Speaker 2
From good looking they are, yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1
exactly. And now one other interesting thing about magnets is if you look at a magnet, let's say you've got a bar magnet, one side is the North Pole, one is the South Pole. What happens if you cut that magnet down the middle? What do you have then? Hot dog style or
Speaker 2
hamburgers? What? Hamburger style. Down the middle. Oh, wait, what? Like, do you cut it in half long ways or? Short ways between the north
Speaker 1
and south poles of
Speaker 2
the magnet. Gotcha, okay. Now, yeah, that's a good question. Do you get two, interesting. Do you get two magnets with a north and south pole, or do you get a north magnet and a south magnet? Ah, I don't know.
Speaker 1
Yeah, this is something that's hard to just imagine but very easily to do experimentally and this experiment is done and you always get two magnets each with a north and south pole.
Speaker 1
Yeah, you can repeat this, cut each of the smaller ones in half, you'll then get like four each with their own north and south. You can keep doing this all the way to the atomic level, and eventually you'll get a single atom of iron, typically iron. You can make permanent magnets out of other things, but iron is by far the most common. And that atom acts as its own small magnet with a north and south pole, which you can't split apart any further. I mean, if you split iron, you'd get a nuclear explosion. Actually, no. Iron, you can't even split to get a nuclear explosion. It's already in a memory. You have to inject a ton of energy.
Speaker 2
So if you split it, then what would happen? You
Speaker 1
have to pour a ton of energy into it. You'll get a fizzle. Iron is the one element that you can't get energy out of by either splitting or fusing.
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. Wow. Is that coincidental? Or is that like the reason why it is the magnet? I think this part actually is coincidental. Okay. Gotcha. The reason why actually comes down to the
Speaker 1
way the electrons are around iron. So if we go back to what I was talking before, that electrons are like miniature solar systems around nucleus. This is wrong and it is very importantly wrong because if electrons were always going in circles around atoms, every atom would be magnetic. But in practice, really only iron and a couple others are. of probability space of where it could be. And most energy levels look something like a cloud or a blob or something like this. They get built up in a very weird way. But the interesting thing is that eventually when you get exactly to iron, the newest energy level you add is the first one that's actually a ring. the first time you could say in some sense, the electron is orbiting. Even then, it's not quite right. But iron puts the electron in the state that that energy level of the electron has a constant magnetic moment, we call it, and causes magnetism. Interesting.