Three Words That Could Overthrow Physics: “What Is Magnetism?”

When Pliny the Elder first beheld a magnet, he was utterly blown away. “What phenomenon is more astonishing?” he wrote later. “Where has nature shown greater audacity?” In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo agreed, declaring himself “thunder­struck” by the sight of a magnet lifting several metal rings. Magnets, he announced, were proof that miracles were real and that God, therefore, existed. “Who would not be amazed,” Augustine marveled, “at this virtue of the stone?” Certainly the 4-year-old Albert Einstein was amazed. When his father showed him a compass, it was young Albert’s first clue, he later wrote, that there was “something behind things, something deeply hidden,” and he spent his life trying to find it.