how do magnets attract things like iron from a distance, without using energy?

Question

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

Answer 1

Magnetism is one of the 4 fundamental forces of nature, like gravity. In a sense, these represent a limit of our scientific understanding – we don’t really know *why* magnetic fields come and go with electric fields (like gravitational fields with mass), we simply observe that they *do*, and quantify the strength of the force we observe.

Sorry for the obtuse sounding answer, but I think you might be asking a more fundamental question about forces.