When the North end of a magnet is close enough to the South end of another magnet electrons will spin out of one pole and spin towards the opposing pole. It is very important to note that the opposing pole is also inverted with respect to its counterpart. This is why the spinning electrons line up. The curl speed of the electrons is probably much higher than the drift speed of the electrons from one magnet to the other. This means that the drift direction matters less than the curl of the electron field.
Implicit in the last paragraph is that the electrons flowing between magnets have a return path. The path is from the outside poles of the magnet. The vector calculus calculated curl of the electron field will line up with the so called 'magnetic field lines' of antiquity.
So why does the North pole attract the South pole in paragraph number 1? When the electrons are spinning from one magnet to the next there will be a boundary between the electrons curling one way and the return path curling the opposite way. The matter at or near the boundary will interact with collisions and cause matter to evacuate the space between the two magnets. This is what causes the attraction.
The opposite happens when a South pole is put next to a South pole. Electrons will work hard to get in between the two magnets pulling in matter. The buoyant feeling of matter stubbornly not evacuating the space between the two magnets in this case.
The Maxwell-Ampere equation backs this up. Substituting del cross I for B with a proportionality constant adjusts the equation so that one does not have to use the magnetic field idea.
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