Not necessarily their purpose. Just what is happening that is creating the force and how does this force interact between fields?
For example, I get how heat transfer works. Conduction and convection make sense to me because two pieces of matter interact with each other and transfer energy. Cool.
I know it’s not a particle so I guess it’s a wave? A wave of what?
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I’m assuming you’ve been taught that electricity is the flow of electrons through a conductive surface and that magnetism is a field created by ferromagnetic materials.
This “lies to children” explanation for these two phenomena obscures what’s really going on.
There is one electromagnetic force, caused by atomic alignment, momentum, and differential atomic charges.
Essentially, it’s most similar to the relationship between gravity and centripetal force — both follow the right hand rule where there is force applied at right angles to the direction of movement.
However, with electricity, this “force” isn’t actually electrons moving from one atom to the next, it’s just a transfer of their kinetic energy. When there are enough transfers that are aligned (so it’s easiest for energy to “flow” in a certain direction, this extends out in an energy field that is just as strong in a vacuum as it is in a large piece of metal. The field decays according to the inverse square law — so the more energy “flowing” in the core, the further away the field will reach.
So you can think of magnetism as being like if two streams of water are running side by side, they will easily join up and then be hard to separate, and if they’re flowing in opposite directions, they will bounce off each other. But the “streams” are not electrons, they’re electromagnetic energy “wavicles” interfering with the space/time relationship of any other particles in the area, according to the inverse square law.
Or, back to the gravity equivalence: if you spin a bucket of water, the force of the spin forces all the water to try to move at right angles to the movement, overcoming gravitational force. Likewise, forcing directional charge in a large number of atoms that can easily give up the energy stored in their outer shell overcomes electromagnetic stasis, and the result is the magnetic field.
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