I’ve read somewhere that magnets dont do work so they dont use energy, but then how come they can move metallic objects? where is that coming from?
In: Physics
This might be the first question I can answer, so here goes:
You have a magnet and an iron ball, we’ll call it a marble. You secure your magnet to one end of a frictionless table, while placing the marble at the other end. The marble, will slowly start rolling towards the magnet, slowly accelerating, until it finally smashes into the magnet and they are now joined. How did this happen? Well as soon as you placed the marble down on the table you started a process of turning all the potential energy stored in the marble into kinect energy. The energy to move the marble was always there, just in a form you couldn’t directly observe until you released the ball. This same principle of turning potential into kinect energy can be observed by throwing a ball in the air, where instead of magnetism, it is gravity that causes the ball to eventually return to earth. (This process is actually kinect to potential to kinect, but same principles)
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