What is a magnet?

What is a magnet?

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Have you ever wondered how that report or shopping list stays in the fridge even if it's been there for weeks?

Organized there only by the application of a tiny flip flop magnet bought for you by someone who was on vacation last year!

Well, here we are going to look at the wonderful world of magnets, from natural to unnatural, and these items have a lot of uses.

So, without further ado, get started!

Attraction.

A magnet, or magnetic material, is a bipolar object, north and south, that attract other magnetic objects and stick them together.

The poles are attracted to each other, so the south is attracted north, and north towards the south.

But if you try and put two similar things together, they push each other continuously.

There are many types of magnets.

There are many types of magnets - these include natural magnetic materials, such as alnico which is an iron alloy and an electromagnet made by the coil of a coil and an electric current passing through it.

Unlike alloys like alnico, the magnetism of an electromagnet ceases as soon as the current stops flowing, which can be very handy for a wide range of modern magnet applications.

What do we use magnets for?

In the modern world, we use magnets in almost every aspect of our lives, from cell phones to cars.

They can even be used during our essential hours in a variety of medical devices including Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI.

However, there is concern that the degree of magnetism surrounding us on a daily basis could cause problems for us: such as a person having a broken pacemaker or swallowing lots of magnetic objects.

The earliest magnets.

Of course, the first magnets found naturally were just around.

The story goes that the founder discovered this mineral after finding the nails of the shoes were stuck to a magnetite rock.

Others say it was Greek or Macedonian, or even our good friend, Pliny the Elder.

Can you tell me something else about magnets?

The world's largest magnet is involved, actually found in Switzerland in the scientific wonder we all know as the Big Hadron Collider.

The Hadron collider has a reasonably weak strength of 40000 Gauss, which in view is 400 times stronger than that of an average refrigerator magnet.

This method was used to investigate subatomic particles and part of the hunt for so-called "magic particles", but this was a topic for another day.

One of the most powerful magnets in the world, of course smaller than the Big Hadron Collider.

One is actually found at Florida State University.

In simple terms, 1 Tesla = 10000 gauss, so this means that it is about 2,500 times stronger than a refrigerator magnet, or 25 times stronger than a scrap magnet.

Another interesting fact is that Scandinavia actually has the largest amount of magnetic materials in the world.

If you put a wooden plank in the water with a magnet and let it float, the magnet directs its north pole to the north pole of the Earth.

So we have it, the magnet, which we use every day in our lives and has benefited us in many ways we can imagine.

Even the world is a big magnet if you think about it - it's polarized with a magnetic south and north pole.