Have you ever hung a picture up on your fridge? Made a call on your cellphone? Rang a doorbell? I bet you have! And when you did, you required a magnet to make it possible. Magnets have been around for thousands of years and we still apply them every day. A magnet is any material that pulls towards certain kinds of metals. Magnets pull towards the metal in your refrigerator door, which is why they can hold papers and pictures in position without any tape or glue. The paper is trapped between the magnet and the refrigerator door and stays there because the pull between the two objects is extremely strong. Magnetism is the force between two things that pulls together or pushes apart. This is the way we describe magnets when they get close to the object that they can interact with, like some kinds of metal. It can be a strong or weak push or pull. You might have even had a paper fall down if the magnetism wasn't robust enough between the magnet and what you were hanging it on. Let's learn more about magnets and how they work. 
Magnets come in various shapes, sizes, and strengths.
OpenStax, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons


Magnets
A pole is one of the two sides of a magnet where the pull towards or the push away from other objects is the strongest. These two sides consistently act the same way. In fact, if you attempt to put two "push" poles of a magnet next to each other, you wouldn't be able to. That is because when you put two of the same poles together, they will repel, or push away, from one another. Go ahead and attempt it! It can be very difficult, if not impossible, to put two identical poles together. On the other hand, if you put two opposite poles together, they will attract, or pull towards, each other. If they are strong, the two magnets will snap quickly together when they get close. This is why a magnet that you utilize to hang things up needs to be opposite from what it is being hung on. 
Poles that are the same will repel each other.
Modified from OpenStax Physics


A compass is another thing that requires magnets to work. A compass is what people use to tell what direction they are going in. The reason it works is that the arrow in it will always point north. That is because the Earth acts like an extremely sizable magnetic bar. 
Opposite poles will attract each other.
Modified from OpenStax Physics


Something interesting regarding magnets is that their two poles will consistently act the same way. If you cut the magnet in half, you create two new ones, each with two poles that will keep acting the same way in terms of how they pull or push other objects. We can keep cutting it and cutting it until we are only left with one solitary atom with two different poles. And guess what - you can't divide them either! 
One end of a bar magnet is suspended from a thread that points toward north. The magnet’s two poles are labeled N and S for north-seeking and south-seeking poles, respectively.
OpenStax, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons


Temporary and Permanent Magnets
Some metals have robust magnetism and others have weak magnetism. What is interesting is that a strong magnet can assist a weak one to become stronger and it can even help something that isn't magnetic become so. Think of this: you can use a strong magnet to pick up something small, like a nail. A nail is a weak magnet by itself. If you touched two nails together, they wouldn't stick together. But, if you press a strong magnet to the nail, it can pick up other nails! That's because the strong magnet is sharing its strength. Pretty interesting! 

Magnets in our World
So many things in our world rely on magnets to work. From your car to your credit card and iPad, magnets are everywhere. In fact, recycling plants use huge magnets to separate iron from other refuse. MRIs have become an important tool in the field of medicine to learn about the inside of the body, and the use of magnets to look at the way the brain works is a subject of research today. Thanks to what we know and understand about magnets and what they do, we can do a lot of cool things. 
Engineering of technology like iPods would not be possible without a deep understanding magnetism.
Jesse! S?, Flickr.com

References

Adapted by the RocketLit Team from:

License

CC BY 4.0