this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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To drop my reply from a similar post:
To be fair: "A magnet works because negatively charged electrons repel each other. "
"Why do negatively charged electrons repel each other? "
"..... Well .. Ok, so hear me out. You're going to need to understand quantum mechanics and then the fermion principal. Then you'll know that the electrons aren't allowed to occupy the same space, and the easiest way to avoid being in the same space is to not touch each other. The electrons know they aren't allowed to touch because they've studied fermions."
"Look man, shit just be doing what it does because it is what it is. If weren't that way everything would be soup or darkness."
Physics at any point when you ask "why" enough.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch...
collapsed inline media
So glad we got to see what it looks like for Carl Sagan to toke up before they CGI'd it away (believable conspiracy I just invented).
You must first invent the universe. - some nerd no doubt
Pretty much. You get towards the bottom and on a fundamental level, there are some things that science just doesn't know. We really don't know how magnets work, when you get down to it.
This is the Coloumbic (electrostatic) force, which is related to magnetism but this explanation would be insufficient to explain magnetism.
This is the Pauli exclusion principle, which does act like a force, but is not the same as the electrostatic force or magnetism.
Magnetism is moving electrons repel/attract/affect each other depending on the direction they are moving.
The simplest explanation for that I know of is that force needs to exist alongside the electrostatic force for the motion of electrons to be consistent with relativistic time and space dilation effects.
And no, that’s not a simple explanation, and it requires explaining relativity, and at the end of the day the best explanation we’ve got for the electrostatic force is more or less “electrons repel each other because they do”.
All models are wrong, some models are useful. A model that is 100% correct is just reality. Science and physics boils down to observation followed by explanation which comes in the form of modeling.
New physics started when plank discovered quantization while integration raleigh-jean and weins laws for blackbody radiation. Schrodinger proposed a model among several proposed models and his fit the best.
Anyone who is surprised by science not knowing all the answers had fundamentally misunderstood science.
Finally, five fields: electromagnetic, gravity, strong, weak, and higgs. Magnetism is just an effect of leptons interacting with the electric field. That's the model, one day when we can explain more with another model there will be more questions.
Bonus points for anyone who knows the quote "who ordered that?"
FYI; electrons are always negatively charged and protons always positively charged. So electrons, for instance, will always want to repel each other.
But your conclusion is a more direct answer to the silly conclusion I gave. Which boils down to, "we don't really know".