Magnatism & The Things We Think We Know About It! :: essays research papers

Magnatism & the Things We THINK We Know About It! Magnatism is a wonderous natural phenomanon. Since days before scientific discoveries were even written down the world has been playing with the theories of magnatism. In these three labs we delt with some of the same ideas which have pondered over for long before any of us were around. In these conclusions we will take a look at these ideas and find out what exactly we have learned. To understand the results of the lab we must first go over the facts about magnatism on the atomic level that we have discovered. The way magnatism works is this: magnatism is all based on the simple principle of electrons and there behavior. Electrons move around the atom in a specific path. As they do this they are also rotating on there own axis. This movement causes an attraction or repultion from the electrons that are unpaird. They are moving in two directions though causing a negative and positive charge. In the case of magnatism though we find that these elements have a lot of unpaired electrons, in the case of iron, Fe, there are four. What happens then in the case of a natural magnet the unpaired electrons line up or the magnet in a specific mannor. That is all the atoms with unpaired electrons moving in a direction which causes a certain charge are lined up on one side and all the atoms with the opposite charge move to the other side. The atoms then start to cancel each other out as they approach the center of the magnet. This all happens at the currie point where these atoms are free to move and then when cooled and the metel becomes solid the atoms can no longer move (barely) causing a "permanent" magnet (as in the diagram on the next page). This same principle can be applied to a piece of metal that has been sitting next to a magnatized piece of metel in that over the long time they are togather the very slow moving atoms in the metal situate in the same fassion also creating a magnet. Now that we know the basics lets begin with the experiments. Part one of the lab started us on our journey. In this part we took an apparatus with wire wrapped around it put a compass in the middle of the wire wraps. The setup was arranged so that the wraps were running parralel with the magnetic field of the earth, that is they were north-south. With this setup we