From where do magnets obtain their "energy"?
Question
Why don't magnets ever "run out of power" to attract or repel? Ferromagnets, in particular. I understand why electric current magnets keep working as long as there is a current, but ferromagnets don't use current, so why do they keep working? Isn't this a contradiction to entropy?
Answer
Dave - Okay. In order to create a magnet, you've actually got to put some energy in in the first place, including for a permanent magnet. You've got to align all the atomic magnets inside the piece of iron and rotate them so their individual magnetic fields all add together. That takes some energy to do initially, but once that state is in place, you don't require any more energy to maintain it. It's a bit like saying, "Why does the Earth keep attracting us forever with gravity?" They're just forces which exist forever.
The actual magnetism in a piece of iron or in a permanent magnet is actually caused essentially by electrons orbiting in one direction more than the other, and the electrons are going to keep on orbiting, as far as we know, indefinitely, unless something interrupts them. So the little atomic magnet is going to carry on forever. There's no reason why the magnet shouldn't carry on.
Chris - It's basically not burning off any energy to make the magnetic field, and it's something interacting with the field that actually makes an effect rather than the other way around.
Diana - But why is it then that some magnets get demagnetised over time?
Dave - Okay. The atomic magnets would stay magnetised, but, if you drop them, you can cause them to re-align a bit every time you drop them. Also, if they get very hot, they can get re-aligned as well. So, the atomic magnets are still there, but instead of all pointing the same direction they start to become more and more randomly organised, so the overall field is less and less, and less.
Comments
Magnets and Energy
Has anyone REALLY considered that MAGNETS are simply, in reality, just a FOCUS for magnetic energy all around us? The alignment of the atoms allows the magnet to catch and focus the Earth's Magnetic field which is driven by astronomical forces and the core of the Earth.
A magnet simply catches the magnetism and causes that energy to flow through it. The Magnet is not the SOURCE of the energy, but merely the FOCUS for that chaotic energy to be captured and directed by it's atomic structure?
Simply put Magnets focus what's already there. Electricity can be made from the fields generated by those magnets. Mr. Joseph Neuman on Lucedale Ms. Stumbled onto this by making wires move through magnetic fields, Yet, he was denied patents on his generator because the Patent Office called his generator "Perpetual Motion", yet the SOURCE of his generator was MAGNETS with drew from natural magnetism from the Earth!
Therefore he had tapped into a virtually Limitless power source, NOT a perpetual motion device at all.
Magnets get their energy from what is all around us. But our Physics flies in the face of this and cannot stand because our Physics cannot truly define magnets... unless you consider what I have said here.
Atomic magnets
So, electrons spinning around the atom create magnetic field? But I was told that ferromagnetic materials lose their force eventually and demagnetize. How come that electrons never lose their energy and start orbiting slower? How can they spin forever without friction or without magnetic interaction that would slow them down?
It's quantum spin...
The electrons are not really spinning around the atom as though in orbit. If they were doing that then they would be changing direction continuously, which would involve acceleration, and that would lead to the production of x-rays, like in a synchrotron, which does not happen.
Instead, the "spin" is a quantum property that endows the atoms with the observed magnetic behaviour.
Magnetism
I agree with all of you....I am a student in class 7 ...I had a keen interest to know about magnets.....and u all gave me a very gud information about them..thanks..
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