Seriously though, how do magnets work?

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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Science

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brainfog — 2 months ago(January 21, 2026 10:12 AM)

The internet spent years dunking on Insane Clown Posse for it, but the actual question "How do magnets work?" is one of the deepest, most difficult questions in physics.
The reason it feels intuitive to say "we don't have a great explanation" is that magnetism is fundamentally alien to human experience.
Here is why even the smartest physicists struggle to explain it without just pointing to a math equation.

1. The Richard Feynman Defense
   The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was once asked this exact question by a journalist. He didn't laugh. instead, he got frustrated.
   He basically said: I can't explain it to you in a way you will understand.
   His point was that humans only understand things through analogy.
   If you ask "What happens when I crash my car?", I can say "It's like crushing a soda can." You know what a soda can is, so you understand.
   But with magnets, there is no analogy. Nothing in our daily life pulls things across a room without touching them except gravity (which pulls down) or magnets. You can't say "It's like a rubber band" because there is no rubber band.
   Feynman’s conclusion was essentially: It just is. The universe has a fundamental property where things push and pull each other at a distance, and you just have to accept it as a brute fact of reality.
2. The "It's Just Atoms" Explanation is a Lie
   When schools teach magnetism, they say: "Electrons spin around the nucleus, and a moving charge creates a magnetic field."
   That sounds like an answer, but it actually opens a bigger can of worms:
   Electrons don't actually spin. If an electron were a little ball physically spinning fast enough to create the magnetic field it has, the surface would have to move faster than the speed of light. That’s impossible.
   Physicists call it "spin," but it's really "intrinsic angular momentum." It is a mathematical property that the particle just has.
   So, if you ask a scientist "Why is the magnet pulling?", they say "Because the electrons have spin." If you ask "Why do they have spin?", they say "They just do." It leads to a dead end.
3. The Really Crazy Part: Magnetism is just Electricity + Relativity
   This is the part that proves we don't really have an "intuitive" grasp of it.
   According to Albert Einstein and Special Relativity, magnetism doesn't technically exist as a separate force. It is just what happens to electricity when you look at it from a moving perspective.
   Here is the mind-bending reality:
   Imagine a wire with electric current flowing through it.
   If you stand still next to the wire, you measure a Magnetic field.
   If you could run alongside the electrons in the wire at the same speed they are moving, the magnetic field would disappear. You would only see an Electric field.
   Magnetism is basically a "correction" the universe applies to electricity to make sure the speed of light stays constant. It is a relativistic side-effect.
   Tldr: It don't make no sense.