Nah, don’t think of it that way. Think of it as “Today, I confronted my ignorance head on and destroyed a part of it. And others read this thread (there are 270 page views at this post) and perhaps I contributed to the destruction of the ignorance of others.”
Heck, that’s our highest calling around here. Congratulations.
if i add 2 + 2 how many do I have (and please don’t say 4)
(I am being facetious and I think I may understand your question but I’ll let someone else take the foist shot.)
OK, do you want the short answer or the long answer? Well, actually, you probably don’t wan the long answer; it involves relativity and can take a while. The short answer is that the opposite poles of a magnet attract, due to an aspect of the electromagnetic force.
Too short, you say? OK, how about this: Charges exert electric forces on each other, such as the attractive force between a proton and an electron in a hydrogen atom (and why do they do that? Just because. Don’t worry about that detail.). Due to relativistic effects, moving charges also produce other forces on each other, which we call magnetism (just what those relativistic effects are is the long answer). For instance, if you have electrons moving through a wire, the net charge is zero (moving negative electrons and stationary positive nuclei cancelling each other out), but they’re moving at different rates, so the magnetic effects don’t cancel, and there’s a magnetic field. Well, in many materials, the electrons moving in each individual atom move in such a way that they don’t cancel out, so each atom produces a magnetic field. In some materials, such as iron, these atoms have a tendancy to all line up in the same direction-- When this happens, you end up with one big magnetic field for the whole object. The moving charges in one magnet produce forces on the moving charges in the other magnet in just such a way that they’re attracted or repelled.
If you really, really want the full long answer, ask it in a new thread… I’m not going to put the effort into answering it unless it’s up at the top of a thread where folks’ll read it.
Chronos, I am not certain but I think that, rather than looking for the nature of magnetism, he is looking for “who did the work? where did the energy come from?” That is how I interpreted the “don’t say it was magnetism”. In other words, if a compressed fluid is doing some work, don’t tell me the fluid did it, what I want is the original source of power. jb_farley?..
sailor- good paraphrasing
everybody- to continue the magnet talk, there’s another thread “Oh chronos my chronos” in GQ.
carry on.
OK, so you want to continue in this other thread but I am not sure oh chronos my chronos was a good choice for a title as it will not attract the attention of people who might be interested. You may also want to restate the question because I think I may be the only one who gets the drift.