I'm thinking about magnetism this morning, as you do when you're a turbo nerd, and I'm realizing that I'm actually hella confused by a simple dichotomy that I believe exists.
I need to draw up a graphic to illustrate my confusion. >.>
ALRIGHTY!!! Here we go! An epiphany about how magnets work, from an electrical engineery understanding of the physics!!
This pondering was inspired by Drake "Styropyro" Anthony's most recent video where he plays around with 100 car batteries, and shows us a magnetic Z-pinch in action during one of his electrically explosive experiments!
My son is into magnets now. One of the books we got him (Janice VanCleave’s Magnets, 1993) had this to say. I don’t know if this is a case of simplifying to the point of absurdity, or pure ignorance on the part of the author.
Alt text: image of text from a book, explaining how materials are made out of atoms. It says “the smallest part of a glass marble is an atom of glass.”
#PhysicsFactlet
Magnetic hysteresis: In a ferromagnet the equilibrium configuration is with all magnetic moments aligned with each other. If we want to flip them, we need to flip all of them at the same time, which requires a stronger field than if the moments were independent, resulting in the characteristic hysteresis loop.
(Simulation done by numerically solve the Landau–Lifshitz equation with a tiny bit of noise added to speed the process up on a square grid of magnetic moment with periodic boundary conditions.)