There is a picture of a cartoon that depicts magnets as arrows that flip randomly when the magnetic attraction of them causes their neighboring magnets to align. This experiment along with other transformations of substances such as water freezing into ice and soup turning into steam over an open fire was a mystery until the 20th century. A German physicist named Wilhelm Lenz wanted to figure out why a magnet can be heated to a certain temperature which will cause it to lose its attractive power. He then had his intern Ernest Ising do some research and he came up with the Ising model.
Key Takeaways:
- Substances changing their form such as water freezing into ice and soup steaming over fire weren’t figured out until the 20th century.
- In 1920 Wilhelm Lenz wanted to figure out why a magnet that is heated past a certain temperature can actually lose its attractive power.
- Ernest Ising was a graduate student and Lenz tasked him with figuring out why these magnets lost their attractive power, and he came up with the Ising Theory.
“It has also penetrated far-flung disciplines well beyond physics, serving as a model of earthquakes, proteins, brains — and even racial segregation.”
Read more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-cartoon-picture-of-magnets-that-has-transformed-science-20200624/
