Understanding Magnetic Forces and Questions

If you get hold of two magnets and you push them,

you can feel this pushing

between them. Turn it around the other way,

and they slam together.

Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?

What do you mean? What's the feeling between the two magnets

when you hold them?

Well, there's something there, isn't there?

I mean, the, the sensation is that there's something there

when you push these two

magnets together.

Listen to my question. What is the meaning when you say that there's,

that there's

a feeling? Of course, you feel it. Now, what do you want to know?

What I want to know is what's going on-

The magnets repel each other

... between these two bits, these two bits of metal.

Magnets repel each other.

Well, then what does that-- but what does that mean or why

are they doing that or

how are they doing it?

Uh, you're asking-

I, I must say, I think that's a perfectly reasonable

question to ask.

Of course, it's a reason-- it's an excellent question. Okay.

Uh,

but the problem that you're asking-- You see, when you ask why something

happens,

how does a person answer why something happens?

For example,

Aunt Minnie is in a hospital. Why? Because she slipped.

She went out, and she slipped on the ice

and broke her hip.

That satisfies it, people.

It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came

from another planet and knew

nothing about things. First, you'd understand why

when you break your hip, do you

go to the hospital?

How do you get to the hospital with the-- when the hip is broken?

Well, because her husband, seeing that she had the hip was broken,

called the

hospital up and sent somebody to get her.

All that is understood by people.

Now, when you explain a why,

you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true.

Otherwise, you're perpetually asking why. Why did the husband call up the hospital?

Because husband is interested in his wife's welfare.

Not always. Some husbands aren't interested in their

wife's welfare when they're

drunk and they're angry.

And so you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its

complications. In order to-- If you try to follow anything up,

you go deeper and deeper in various directions.

If, for example, you could go, "Well, why did she slip on the ice?" Well, ice is

slippery. Everybody knows that. No problem.

But you ask, "Why is ice slippery?"

That's kind of curious. Ice is extremely slippery.

It's very interesting.

You say, "How does it work?" You could e-- You see, so you could either say,

"I'm satisfied that you've answered me. Ice is slippery.

That explains it." Or you could go on and say, "Why is ice slippery?"

And then you're involved with something because there aren't many things as

slippery as ice. It's very hard to get greasy stuff,

but that's sort of wet and slimy. But a solid that's so

slippery?

Because it is in the case of ice that when you stand on it, they say,

momentarily, the pressure melts the ice a little bit,

so you got a sort of

instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping.

Why on ice and not on other things? Because ice expands when it-- water

expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the

expansion

and melts it. It's capable of melting it.

But other substances contract

when they're freezing, and when you push them,

they're just satisfied to be solid.

Why does water expand when it freezes and other substances don't expand

when they

freeze? All right. I'm, I'm not answering your question,

but I'm telling you how

difficult a why question is. You have to know what it is

that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood

and known and what it is you're not.

You'll notice in this example that the more I ask why,

it gets interesting afterwards. My idea that the deeper a thing is,

the more

interesting it is.

And, uh,

we could even go further and say, "Why did she fall down when she slipped?"

That has to do with gravity involved in all the planets and everything else.

Never mind. It goes on and on. Now, when you ask, for example,

why two magnets repel,

there are many different levels. It depends on whether you're a student of

physics

or an ordinary person that doesn't know anything or not.

If you're somebody who doesn't know anything at all about it, all I can say

is that

there's a magnetic force that makes them repel and

that you're feeling that

force.

And you say, "But that's very strange because I don't

feel a kind of force like

that in other circumstances." When you turn them the other way,

they attract.

There's a very analogous force, electrical force, which

is the same kind of a

question. And you say, "That's also very weird."

But you're not at all disturbed by the fact that when you put your hand on the

chair, it pushes you back.

But we found out by looking at it that that's the same force,

as a matter of fact,

the electrical force, not magnetic exactly in that case.

But it's the same electric repulsions that are involved in keeping your

finger away from the chair because everything's made out of its electrical

forces

in minor and microscopic details.

There's other forces involved, but this is,

is connected to electrical forces.

It turns out that the magnetic and the electric force with

which I wish to explain

these things, this, this repulsion in the first place, is what

ultimately is the deeper thing that we have to start-- that we can start

with to explain many other things that looked like they were--

everybody would just accept them.

You know you can't put your hand through the chair.

That's taken for granted. But that you can't put your hand through the

chair when

looked at more closely why, it involves these same repulsive

forces

that appear in magnets.

The situation you then have to explain is why in magnets it goes over a bigger

distance than in ordinarily. And there it has to do with the fact

that in iron, all the electrons are spinning in the same direction.

They all get lined up, and they magnify the effect of the force

until it's large enough at a distance that you can feel it.

But it's a force which is present all the time and very common

and is in a basic force of almost. I mean, I can go a little further

back if I were more technical. But at an early level, I just have to

tell you that's going to be one of the things you'll just have to

take as an element in the world, the existence of magnetic repulsion

or electrical, or electrical attraction, magnetic attraction.

I can't explain that attraction in terms of anything else that's

familiar to you.

For example, if we said the magnets attract like as

if they were connected by

rubber bands, I would be cheating you

because they're not connected by rubber bands. I shouldn't be in trouble.

You'd soon ask me about the nature of the bands.

And secondly, if you were curious enough, you'd ask me why rubber

bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that

in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things

that I'm trying to use the

rubber bands to explain, so I have cheated very badly, you see.

So I'm not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract

each other, except to tell you that they do

and to tell you that that's one of the elements in the world of the different

kinds

of forces. There are electrical forces, magnetic forces, gravitational forces, and

others,

and those are some of the parts.

If you were a student, you'd go fur-- I could go further.

I could tell you that the magnetic forces

are related to the electrical forces very

intimately,

that our relationship between the gravity forces and electrical forces remains

unknown,

and so on. But I really can't do a good job,

any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of

something else that you're more familiar with because I don't understand it in

terms of anything else that you're more familiar with.