Daily Junction.mobi portalScience · February 18, 2025 · Dr. Nadia Okoro · 5 min
Magnets pull and push without touching, yet the reason why is rooted in the behaviour of electrons. This guide explains magnetic fields, poles, why iron is magnetic, and how magnetism and electricity are two sides of one force.
A magnet is one of the first pieces of real physics most of us ever hold. Slide one across a table towards another and you feel it — an invisible push or pull, with nothing touching, no string, no trick. It is genuinely strange when you stop to think about it. So how does a lump of metal reach out across empty space and grab another? The answer takes us deep inside the atom, and reveals one of the most important connections in all of science. This guide explains how magnets work.
Magnetism is a force, produced by the movement and spin of electrons inside atoms, that causes certain materials to attract or repel one another without touching. Everything is built from atoms, and within every atom are electrons — tiny, electrically charged particles. As these electrons move and spin, each one behaves like an unimaginably small magnet.
In most substances, these tiny atomic magnets point in every direction at random, so their effects cancel out and the material shows no magnetism. In a magnet, something different has happened: vast numbers of these electrons line up in the same direction, so their individual contributions add together. The combined result is strong enough to feel — and that is magnetism.
Every magnet, no matter its size, has two ends with opposite character, called poles: a north pole and a south pole. They cannot be separated. Snap a bar magnet in half and you do not get one north piece and one south piece; you get two smaller magnets, each with its own north and south. This pairing is fundamental to how magnetism works.
The poles govern the behaviour everyone knows from playing with magnets:
This simple rule — opposites attract, likes repel — is the heart of magnetic interaction, and it falls directly out of how the magnets' fields meet, which we turn to next.
A magnet does not need to touch something to affect it, because it is surrounded by an invisible region called a magnetic field. This is the area around a magnet within which its force can be felt; the closer you are, the stronger it is.
You can actually see the shape of this field. Scatter iron filings on paper over a bar magnet and they arrange themselves into curved lines arcing from one pole to the other. These field lines map the field's direction and strength: where they crowd together, near the poles, the field is strongest.
A magnetic field is not empty space being mysterious. It is a real, measurable region of influence, and it is what lets one magnet act on another across a gap.
Understanding the world through such careful observation and measurement is exactly the approach described in the scientific method — turning an everyday wonder into something we can map and predict.
Only a handful of materials make good magnets or are strongly attracted to them — chiefly iron, along with nickel and cobalt. The reason lies in how their atoms can organise.
In these metals, groups of atoms naturally form tiny regions called domains, within which all the electrons line up the same way. Each domain is itself a small magnet. In an ordinary, unmagnetised piece of iron, the domains point in random directions and cancel out. But expose the iron to a strong magnetic field, and the domains swing into alignment, all pointing the same way. Now the whole object behaves as a magnet.
This also explains some familiar effects. Stroke a steel needle with a magnet and you can magnetise it by aligning its domains. Drop or heat a magnet hard enough and you can scramble those domains again, weakening or destroying its magnetism. Most materials — wood, plastic, glass, water — simply cannot form aligned domains at all, which is why they ignore magnets entirely.
Here is the most profound part. Magnetism is not a force on its own; it is one half of a single, unified force called electromagnetism. Magnetism and electricity are intimately connected, each able to create the other.
This two-way relationship is why so much of modern life runs on electromagnetism, and why understanding electricity and magnetism really means understanding one phenomenon, not two. The same connection lies behind motors, generators and even the broader family of electromagnetic waves that includes the light responsible for rainbows.
On the grandest scale, our entire planet behaves like a giant magnet. Deep in the Earth's core, the movement of molten iron generates a vast magnetic field that surrounds the whole world. This is what makes a compass needle swing to point north, and it shields us from much of the harmful radiation streaming from the Sun.
The same churning interior that drives this magnetic field is bound up with the heat and motion deep underground that also shifts the tectonic plates at the surface — a reminder that the planet's hidden depths shape our world in more ways than one.
Magnets work because of electrons — the movement and spin of these tiny charged particles inside atoms makes each a minute magnet, and in a true magnet, countless electrons line up to act as one. Every magnet has a north and a south pole, with opposites attracting and likes repelling, and each is wrapped in an invisible magnetic field that lets it act across empty space. Materials like iron are magnetic because their atoms can align into domains, while most materials cannot. Above all, magnetism is inseparable from electricity: two faces of a single force that powers the modern world and even surrounds our planet.
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