What is a magnet?
Our totally adorable son asked me what a magnet was. I have no idea. Really, I'm crazy about magnets, I have tons of them, and I use a big honking magnet in my research, and I completely got my flux lines in a twist on this one.
Here's a common definition : a magnet is a material that creates a magnetic field. Totally useless. Nobody should accept this. It's like saying a pork chop is a chop made out of pork. Yes I know it's technically correct, and there's a deeper meaning in it when you think about what a field is, but fundamentally, what is a magnet? Light is a photon or a wave depending on how you look at it. Electricity is just electrons moving around. A magnet is, ummm, uhhhh,.....
OK here's another common definition : a magnet is an object that sticks to metals. This one is kind of tempting, but has the major problem that there are certainly metals that a magnet won't stick to (ok - weakly diamagnetic, which repels the magnet anyway) such as copper I think.
With my cow-eyed three year old staring up at me, I came up with ' a magnet can stick to some metals, but not all, and it's kind of funny how it sticks to some and not others and...' and then I was totally losing him. I was thinking, how can I tell my kid that any charged particle with angular momentum has a magnetic moment? Why is this so hard?
Then Jenn saved the day. Because of course we were playing with Henry's magnadoodle at the time and she says simply that a magnet is anything that can draw on the magnadoodle. And so he starts imaging all kinds of magnets from our fridge on the magnadoodle and drawing with them too. I'm not worthy.
Comments
Your story cracked me up. Paul didn't read the post, but I told him about it, and he also found it to be humorous. :-) I wouldn't have a good answer for Nadia if she asked me what a magnet was either. Your story reminded me of a friend of mine whose child asked about sex. And she went into this long winded discussion on the "birds and bees" to which the child said - how can I fit all that in this little box? The child was trying to fill out a form and needed to identify GENDER - M or F. LOL! Anyhow sometimes I think we make our answers too complex for what the child needs at that moment - and Jenn's definition was right on target for that momebt. :-)
Posted by: Ruth Kennedy | March 14, 2009 09:13 PM
That's a hilarious story! Learning how to talk with your kid is really hard, but really fun...
Of course, not so secretly, I'm floored that he was asking about magnets (possibly with some prompting from Jenn).
Posted by: David | March 14, 2009 10:41 PM
My favorite answer of Jenn's is when Henry asks "why?" She sometimes replies, "Because they were born that way" to which Henry usually never has an answer. I have started using it myself but, if my kid *ever* asks about magnets (possibly with some prompting by you!) then I may use this answer too.
Posted by: Megan | March 21, 2009 08:03 PM
this is a totally adorable post. I even shared it with eric.
Posted by: phoebe | May 10, 2009 10:12 PM