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Essay about Concepts, Theories and Unknowns Aspects of Magnetism

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Concepts, Theories and Unknowns Aspects of Magnetism

Magnetism has long been one of the great mysteries of the world. It has gone for so long unexplained and although there has been a lot of progress in figuring out how magnetism works and what it’s caused by, it still isn’t completely understood. There are many theories about magnetism, but there is still much more yet to be discovered about magnetism. In the future it will probably be easily understood, but none the less intriguing.
Magnets have intrigued people for a long time; they were discovered long ago. Certain rocks and ores of iron called lodestones were found. These lodestones which were naturally magnetic rocks made of the mineral magnetite, were so mysterious to …show more content…

Lucretius (99-55 BC), a roman poet and philosopher, was one of the first to observe that a loadstone or magnet stone could both attract and repel other magnets. For about thirteen hundred years after Lucretius, scholars insisted that certain magnets possessed the property of attraction while others possessed the property of repulsion. To their minds, it did not seem possible that the same magnet could both attract and repel other magnets. Gradually it became evident that the two ends, or poles of a magnet are unlike in certain respects. Roger Bacon (1210-1294), an English philosopher and scientist pointed out that magnets could repel as well as attract other magnets.
In 1600, William Gilbert, an English doctor, proposed that the earth was like a giant magnet. He had been experimenting with round pieces of magnetite and magnetized needles when he realized that the magnetite was attracting the needles in a way similar to the earth’s attraction of a compass needle. William Gilbert was also the first to call the ends of the magnets poles.
William Gilbert's idea that the earth is a giant magnet turned out to be basically true. The earth is thought to obtain its magnetism from electricity made by molten iron and nickel sliding around inside it. The Earth’s magnetism is centered at an area in northeastern Canada by the North Pole (another center is by the South Pole). The needle of a compass points not to the top of the earth but to the magnetic north pole

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