My five year old son asked this question. I understand the magnetic field and their direction. But i need help in articulating how to explain it to my son without introducing a lot of new concepts and falling into the trap of infinite questions.
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So everything we think of as a physical interaction is energy fields interacting. When you clap, your hands aren’t quite touching each other, there’s always space between atoms.
Magnets have really strong fields around them that extend their interaction with the physical world farther than we normally experience. The shape of the field can sort of be thought of as Lego.
When you connect a south and north pole of magnets, it’s like clicking together two pieces, they socket together nicely, but trying to connect two north poles would be like trying to jam the tops of two Lego pieces together, they don’t fit and will resist being forced together.
So the magnet kind of has an invisible shape around it that only interacts with other magnetic things.
As we’re actually explaining to a literal 5-year-old, continuing with the LEGO analogy as another commented:
it’s like how LEGOs have bumps on top (North) and holes underneath (South). If you stack three 2×4 plates together, (North to south, then north to south), it’s the same size and shape as a 2×4 brick, which also has bumps (north) and holes underneath (south).
It’s like this so that you can stack magnets a similar way like LEGOs and make a really big magnet out of lots of smaller magnets that all add up. A really big magnet can be strong enough to lift a car like at a junkyard, but it’s built the same like smaller magnets. Of course it’s an electromagnet made with coils of wire, but it’s just a lot more coils of heavier wire than the tiny coils of wire that make up the motor inside of a toy.
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