Magnets and The Economist

So I was just reading The Economist and this publication was reporting that complicated magnets were getting easier to manufacture into mechanical pieces with tolerances of 1 mm or less. Oak Ridge National Laboratories is working on building stators for motors and generators.

Lets review how magnets work. Electrons often spin and engage in circular motion around the atomic nucleus. The electrons will have angular momentum a physicist will say. If an electron is spinning in a circular manner inside the lattice of a magnet it will leave the lattice or interact with electrons outside of the lattice. The angular momentum will propagate along magnetic field lines until it re-enters the magnet at the other pole of the magnet. The angular momentum will have to add up.

Therefore, we have net spinning of electrons inside a magnet's lattice and around the lattice of the magnet in the air around the magnet. If one puts a piece of paper on the magnet and sprinkle iron filings on the paper the iron filings will line up with the magnet's so called 'field' of spinning electrons.

The radius of the spin of the electrons should be of great focus. Perhaps the new X-Ray machines, developed at the accelerator labs, will shed a light on statistics for electron movement relating to magnetic effects.

The interactions between any two electrons must be viewed statistically. Looking at a small magnet the interactions between any two electrons can be modeled statistically as a Poisson arrival. If we look at fields of spinning electrons around a magnet there will be regions where the electrons move together and regions where the electrons react with each other more violently.

Where electrons are spinning in opposite directions we have many and more violent interactions. Electrons will scatter and they will take the positively charged ions with them. This kind of interaction happens where magnetic field lines of one direction are very near to magnetic field lines pointed in the opposite direction.

All of the scattering allows the air to tend towards vacuum and the magnets pull together. If the magnets do not pull together air quickly back fills itself such that no observable vacuum of any sort develops.