Fucking magnets, how do they work?
Unironically, magnetism is similar to charge, which is similar to mass.
You (probably) wouldn’t ask “But why does an atom weigh anything?” or “why do opposite charges attract?” All these things are just intrinsic properties of matter: they just have them.
So the answer to questions regarding why anything has mass/charge/magnetic moment really come down to “they just do.”
Now, if you want to talk about how and why magnets work at a macroscopic scale, we can have a long and interesting chat about long range ordering and phase transitions, but I’ll leave that for now :)
There’s a lot more to it than “they just do” we just don’t know yet because there’s actually a lot we don’t understand about the fundamental properties of, well, fundamental particles.
See the higgs boson as for why matter has mass. We used to say “inertia is a property of matter” but some clever fucks figured out why and then proved it.
I would argue that the Higgs mechanism is just that: A mechanism for explaining where mass comes from. You could explain charge in a similar way by saying “because the particles are made of a certain amount of up or down quarks”.
Neither of these explanations answer the underlying question “but why does the Higgs mechanism give things mass?” or “but why do up/down quarks give things charge?”.
My point is that, at some stage, you get to the point of “the Higgs boson has mass because it’s an intrinsic property of the Higgs boson”, which is tantamount to “they just do”.
Mass & gravity are still way easier to understand on a fundamental level, especially since everything has a certain amount of mass and thus affects and is affected by gravity. It’s a much simpler concept. (“Natural”) magnetism is (so far) very material specific and I don’t think I’ve seen a good explanation as to why exactly. Magnets certainly behave very differently than other materials and that causes this mysticism in people when they think about magnets. Given the still ongoing research into magnetism and related things like superconductivity there’s certainly a lot still to learn.
In addition to “they just do”, the answer is also “we don’t know.” In that sense, icp was right.
This reminded me of Richard Feynman talking about this very topic. Always enjoy rewatching it.
When I was much younger, I asked my dad why things obeyed the laws of physics. That seems similar to your questions in the second paragraph.
Still haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer.
The answer is because everything is lazy, and it’s easier to obey the laws of physics than not to. The path of least resistance is real.
Why are the laws of physics the way they are and not different? I have a degree in physics and I still don’t know the answer to that, annoyingly.
To that I would answer that things don’t “obey the laws of physics” in any greater sense than that the “laws” of physics are principles that we’ve formulated based on how we’ve observed that nature behaves.
We have exactly zero proof that there is some inherent property of nature that always and forever will prevent heat from moving from cold to hot, even though that would violate the second law of thermodynamics. It’s just that we have never observed a process that violates the second law (people have tried very hard to break this one), and have a decent explanation for why we’re not able to break it.
If some process is developed or observed that violates the “laws of physics”, that just means we need to figure out where the “laws” are wrong, and revise them, which is how science moves forwards!
So short answer: Things obey the laws of physics, because whenever we observe something that breaks the laws, we revise the laws to allow for the newly observed behaviour.
This is what makes science fundamentally different from most belief systems: The only core principle is that anything can at any time be disproven, and everything we think we know is potentially wrong. By truly internalising that core belief, there’s no amount of proof that can turn your worldview upside down, because your core principle is that everything you think you know is potentially wrong, only being a more or less good approximation to the true underlying nature of the universe, which we can never really know anything about.
