Why Magnets Work | Leonard Susskind

Описание: Magnets feel mysterious. They attract and repel without touching, acting across empty space in ways that seem almost magical. Despite being taught in school, magnetism is rarely explained in a way that truly makes sense.

In this video, we explore why magnets work — and why the answer is far stranger than most people expect.

At a fundamental level, magnetism is not an independent force. It emerges from electricity combined with the structure of spacetime itself. When charges move, relativity and time symmetry transform electric forces into what we perceive as magnetic effects.

Drawing on ideas associated with Leonard Susskind, this explanation reveals how magnetism depends on motion, reference frames, and the deep symmetry of physical laws. In many formulations, magnetism can be understood as electricity viewed through the lens of time and relativity.

This perspective reshapes how we think about forces, causality, and even time itself. Magnetism works not because nature invented a separate force, but because spacetime allows interactions to look different depending on how time and motion are arranged.

This is a calm, intuitive documentary for viewers who want to understand one of the most familiar — and misunderstood — phenomena in physics.