You wake up. Check your phone. Turn on the lights. Make coffee. In these simple morning rituals, you’re unknowingly interacting with one of nature’s most mysterious and invisible forces. Magnetism doesn’t announce itself with fanfare, nor does it demand your attention. Yet without it, your entire existence would look drastically different, if it existed at all.
Think about it for a second. Magnetism is generated by the motion of electrons within atoms, representing different aspects of the fundamental force of electromagnetism. This unseen force is quietly working behind the scenes in everything from the device you’re reading this on to the cosmic structures billions of light years away. Let’s dive into how this mysterious phenomenon touches your life in ways you’ve probably never imagined.
The Atomic Dance That Powers Everything
This force arises from the motion of electric charges, governing the behaviour of magnetic materials and fields. Picture electrons whirling around atomic nuclei, spinning on their own axes like tiny planets. Electrons all have a fundamental quantum mechanical property of angular momentum, known as spin, and inside atoms, most electrons tend to form pairs in which one is spin up and the other is spin down. When these spins point in opposite directions, their magnetic fields cancel out. Simple enough, right?
Yet here’s the fascinating bit. Some atoms contain one or more unpaired electrons, and these unpaired electrons create a tiny magnetic field. In rare elements like iron, cobalt, and nickel, the fields line up to create what is known as a net magnetic dipole, and these elements are commonly known as magnetic metals or natural magnets. It’s this alignment that gives us the magnets you stick on your fridge and the technology that powers modern civilization.
Your Invisible Shield From Space
Right now, as you read this, you’re being protected by an invisible force field. Sounds like science fiction? Earth is surrounded by an immense magnetic field called the magnetosphere, generated by powerful, dynamic forces at the center of our world, which shields us from erosion of our atmosphere by the solar wind and cosmic rays from deep space. Without this protection, life as you know it simply wouldn’t exist.
The magnetic field is generated by electric currents due to the motion of convection currents of a mixture of molten iron and nickel in Earth’s outer core. This churning, liquid metal core essentially turns our planet into a giant electromagnet. When comparing Earth’s loss of oxygen with Mars during the same stream of solar wind, Mars’ increase in the rate of oxygen loss was ten times that of Earth’s increase. That difference shows just how vital your magnetic shield really is. Mars lost most of its atmosphere precisely because it lacks a strong protective magnetic field.
Every Device in Your Pocket Runs on Magnetic Magic
You probably don’t think about magnetism when scrolling through social media or listening to music, yet it’s absolutely essential. The interaction between magnetic fields and electric currents is harnessed in numerous applications, such as in electric motors and generators, where the motion of a conductor through a magnetic field induces an electromotive force, generating electrical power. Your smartphone, laptop, and headphones all depend on this principle.
Magnetism influences everyday life through its applications in electronics, data storage, and medical imaging, such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), which relies on strong magnetic fields to produce detailed images of the body’s interior. Every photo on your computer, every song in your playlist, every video you stream is stored using magnetic technology. As storage technologies have advanced, magnets have enabled greater storage densities, faster read/write speeds, and continued improvements in magnetic data storage will drive further progress in computing, smartphones, and many other technologies. Honestly, modern life would grind to a halt without these invisible magnetic forces working tirelessly.
The Cosmic Web Woven by Magnetic Threads
Let’s zoom out. Way out. When we look out into space, all of the astrophysical objects that we see are embedded in magnetic fields, not only in the neighborhood of stars and planets, but also in the deep space between galaxies and galactic clusters. This revelation is relatively recent and absolutely mind-blowing. The universe itself is fundamentally magnetic.
One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primordial, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe, in which case weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the voids of the cosmic web, and the omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters. Models show that magnetic fields may spontaneously arise in turbulent plasma, and the turbulence of those plasmas can also amplify magnetic fields once they’ve been generated, which helps explain how magnetic fields that originate on small scales can sometimes eventually reach to stretch across vast distances. Magnetic fields literally connect galaxies across billions of light years, forming an invisible cosmic web.
Animals That See What You Cannot
Here’s something that might blow your mind. Magnetoreception is the ability of some animals to respond or react to magnetism – a sixth sense that allows them to see the unseen, with the best-known examples being birds, some species of which navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field during their spectacular globe-spanning migrations. Birds essentially have built-in GPS systems based on Earth’s magnetic field.
But it gets weirder. Perhaps the most extraordinary case is that of magnetic cows, as researchers have claimed that cows around the world tend to align their bodies with the Earth’s magnetic field whenever they are grazing or resting. Experiments on migratory birds provide evidence that they make use of a cryptochrome protein in the eye, relying on the quantum radical pair mechanism to perceive magnetic fields, and this effect is extremely sensitive to weak magnetic fields. We’re talking quantum mechanics happening inside bird eyes to detect magnetic fields. Nature figured out quantum sensing long before humans did.
Medical Miracles Through Magnetic Vision
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines employ powerful neodymium magnets to produce detailed images of internal body structures for diagnostic purposes. These machines let doctors peer inside your body without cutting you open or exposing you to harmful radiation. It’s genuinely remarkable when you think about it.
The magnets in MRI scanners are supercooled electromagnets that generate a strong, uniform magnetic field around the patient, with most MRI magnets utilizing coils of superconducting wire through which flows an electric current, immersed in liquid helium to cool them to nearly negative 270 degrees Celsius. They are also used for cancer treatment, wherein magnetically sensitive fluids and heat generated by strong magnets help destroy cancer cells without harming healthy organs. Magnetism is literally saving lives every single day in hospitals worldwide.
A Force That Bends Space Itself
You might think magnetism only affects magnetic materials, but here’s where things get really wild. By reanalyzing the basic equations of general relativity, a researcher discovered that magnetic fields tend to flatten and stiffen the fabric of space-time. Yes, magnetism actually warps the very fabric of reality.
A term in the equation showed that magnetic fields transfer their properties to the very fabric of space-time itself, and like rubber bands under tension, magnetic field lines try to remain as straight as possible, transmitting that tension to space-time, making nearby space like a rubber sheet that has been stretched a little bit tighter. This means magnetic fields don’t just exist in space – they fundamentally alter the structure of space itself. Let that sink in for a moment.
New Magnetic Discoveries Still Emerging
You’d think after centuries of study, we’d have figured magnetism out completely. Not even close. Researchers have recently found signs of a wholly new class of magnetism, one with characteristics of each of the two conventional kinds, ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, with more than 200 materials predicted to be altermagnets. Scientists literally just discovered an entirely new type of magnetism.
Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered that the magnetic component of light plays a direct role in the Faraday effect, overturning a 180-year-old assumption that only its electric field mattered, and their findings show that light can magnetically influence matter, not just illuminate it, opening new possibilities in optics, spintronics, and quantum technologies. A fundamental principle of physics that stood unchallenged for nearly two centuries was just rewritten. The frontiers of magnetic science are still expanding rapidly.
The Magnetic Future Awaits
The SKA telescopes will observe thousands of distant, faint galaxies, building a detailed picture of the magnetic environment, and astronomers will ask whether significant primordial fields existed before the first stars and galaxies, and if not, when and how were magnetic fields subsequently generated, and what maintains the present-day magnetic fields of galaxies, stars and planets. These questions could reshape our understanding of cosmic evolution entirely.
Magnetism continues to surprise and challenge us. We know that magnetism influences star formation, affecting how many stars are created from gas clouds inside galaxies and how massive they become, and it’s also possible magnetic fields affect the evolution of galaxies, influencing the formation of the arms of spiral galaxies. The more we learn about this invisible force, the more we realize how fundamentally it shapes everything from atoms to galaxies.
From the electrons spinning in your body’s atoms to the vast cosmic web connecting galaxy clusters across unimaginable distances, magnetism is constantly at work. It protects your planet, powers your technology, guides migrating birds across continents, helps doctors heal the sick, and even bends the fabric of space and time itself. This invisible, silent force touches every aspect of your existence.
Did you expect magnetism to be this profound? Most people think of it as just the force that makes fridge magnets stick. The reality is so much more extraordinary. What other invisible forces might be shaping your world in ways you haven’t even considered?
Jan loves Wildlife and Animals and is one of the founders of Animals Around The Globe. He holds an MSc in Finance & Economics and is a passionate PADI Open Water Diver. His favorite animals are Mountain Gorillas, Tigers, and Great White Sharks. He lived in South Africa, Germany, the USA, Ireland, Italy, China, and Australia. Before AATG, Jan worked for Google, Axel Springer, BMW and others.
