Unit 7: Opposites Attract

Like Paula Abdul said perfectly in her song; opposites attract! That's right, this unit was all on magnets! If that's what you were thinking of when I said opposites attract.
Alright lets get into magnets!

Magnets

Magnets has 2 pole, North and South. What!? This is just like our earth! Except in our earth, the magnetic poles are flipped, which means South is our North and North is our South; confusing, yes I know. These poles direct the way the magnet attracts/repel:

As you can see the north pole forces out, while south pulls in. This causes the opposites attract and like not to attract, since like 2 North pushes away from each other.
Going back to our earth being flipped, what I meant was compasses, they point North right? Wrong! Compasses actually align with the magnetic field of the earth and follow the arrows. Looking at the picture above you can see that the arrows of a magnetic field around the object go South. So North is our South.

Motors

Motors in the unit of magnets? I know, I thought the same thing, but motors actually run by magnets. A motor is a current carrying wire in a magnetic field being forced in a certain way. Motors use Alternating current for it to run. Here is diagram for motors:

ElectroMagnetic Induction

Big Words! Electromagnetic induction is charging a wire/creating a current and voltage with a source of a magnetic field. We see this in our everyday lives, but just don't notice it. Traffic lights have this! Here's a video over how electromagnetic induction works in a traffic light:

Transformers

Transformers help us out so much. They are in our laptop chargers, wire poles, and other appliances. A transformer is a tool in a wire setup that either steps up or down the voltage and current for an appliance. Transformers have 2 sets of coiled wires, the first set is the primary coil and the secondary coil is the second one. The first one, lets say has 100 coils and supplies 10V from the wall, your computer needs 1V to run, so the secondary coil will have 10 coils because P=Psecondary. These transformers work through electromagnetic induction also.