How Do Magnets & Metals Attract?
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Magnets
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Most people are familiar with some of the uses of magnetic fields and forces. Magnets can be used to see inside a person's skull with medical technology, they can be used to create an electric current in a dynamo, and they are particularly handy for sticking things to a refrigerator. But what it is that makes a magnet work, and which gives it all of the unique properties, is called its magnetic field. Explaining what a magnetic field is, how it's generated, and what effect that can have on certain metals, though, is a little more difficult to explain.
Magnetic Fields
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All magnets create a magnetic field. This field can be thought of as an invisible sphere around a magnet that is the limits of its powers of attraction. A magnetic field is created by a flow of electrons, which are negatively charged particles. For instance, a magnetic field can be created by running a charge through a coil of copper wire wrapped around a nail. This sort of magnet is called an electromagnet, since the field is being created by an electric current. Natural magnets need no current, but they create this field of moving electrons naturally.
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Attraction
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While it's commonly thought that magnets attract metals in general, there is a select group of metals that responds to magnetic fields. Those metals include nickel, iron, steel, and cobalt. Due to the makeup of these metals when they're placed in an electric field they're attracted to the magnet that's the source. If a metal is left in contact with a magnet and its magnetic field long enough, then that metal may take on temporary magentic properties as well. This is because of how a magnet aligns the atoms and electrons of the magnetic metals... but once they return to their former layout, then the temporary magnetism goes away.
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