What if there were no magnets?

A magnet can pick up a paperclip. It can hold a drawing on the fridge.

What if there were no magnets anywhere? What would be different?

Magnets seem like simple toys. They grab paperclips and hold notes on the fridge. But the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory points out that electric motors and speakers are magnets too, and the Earth itself is a giant magnet.

So what if there were no magnets at all? This lab is a thought experiment. We can't remove magnets from the world, but we can follow the clues to see what might change.

A magnet is anything with a north and a south pole that produces a magnetic field, from Earth itself to the coils in an electric motor (National MagLab). The EIA explains that magnetic fields pull and push electrons, and calls magnets the key to making electricity.

This thought experiment asks: if there were no permanent magnets and no electromagnets, which technologies would lose their working principle? We follow three threads: everyday magnets, motors and speakers, and compasses.

Magnets are on fridges and in toys. They are also hidden inside machines.

Electric motors and speakers have magnets inside.

Look around your home and you might spot a few magnets on the fridge. Many more are hidden. The U.S. Energy Information Administration explains that moving a magnet near a coil of wire pushes electrons along the wire and makes an electric current. That is how generators make electricity.

Electric motors work the other way round. The National MagLab shows a simple motor that pairs a magnet with a coil of wire carrying a current, and the push between them makes the coil spin.

EIA describes the generator principle: moving a magnet around a coil of wire, or a coil around a magnet, pushes out loosely held electrons in metals such as copper and creates a current, turning kinetic energy into electrical energy.

The National MagLab's DC motor tutorial shows the reverse: a permanent magnet (the stator) and an electromagnet coil (the rotor). Current in the coil creates a field that turns it toward alignment; a split-ring commutator reverses the current every half turn so the rotor keeps spinning.

Imagine all the magnets disappear.

Fridge pictures might fall down. Motors and speakers might go quiet. A compass might stop pointing the way.

Imagine every magnet vanished, including the coils that become magnets when electricity flows. Fridge magnets would fall, which is easy to fix with tape. But electric motors might stop turning, and speakers might go silent.

The biggest change might be electricity itself. Generators use magnets to make current, so power stations that rely on them might stop. A compass would just be a needle. These are ideas, built from how magnets are used today.

Remove permanent magnets and electromagnets and the motor principle (force on a current in a field) and generator principle (current induced by a changing field) both vanish. Every machine built on them would lose its working mechanism, from motors and loudspeakers to generators.

What would remain is harder to judge. Other ways to make electricity, and devices that do not use magnets, would be unaffected in principle, but how a society would adapt is speculation. A world without magnetism itself would be a far bigger change, which this lab does not explore.

Magnets can push and pull without touching.

They can also push tiny bits inside wires, called electrons. That is how magnets help make electricity.

Magnets push and pull on each other without touching: opposite ends pull together, matching ends push apart. The EIA explains that magnetic fields also push and pull on electrons, the tiny particles that flow through wires as electric current.

That is the key. A magnet moving past a wire can push electrons along it, making electricity. And electricity flowing in a wire near a magnet gets a push, making motion. Magnets are the link between electricity and movement.

EIA explains magnetism at the atomic scale: electrons spinning around an atom's nucleus create tiny fields; in most materials they point randomly and cancel, while in magnets they align and add up to a field that flows from the north-seeking pole to the south-seeking pole.

Fields exert forces on moving charges. That one interaction underlies both generators (motion → current) and motors (current → motion), which is why removing magnets removes both. This is a qualitative argument; no model here computes the consequences.

Earth is a giant magnet. A compass uses it to show the way.

Hospitals use giant magnets to take pictures inside your body.

Earth is a magnet, too. NOAA explains that a compass needle lines up with Earth's magnetic field where it sits, which is how compasses help people find their way.

Hospitals rely on magnets as well. MRI scanners use powerful magnets to make detailed pictures of the inside of the body, the National Institutes of Health explains. Without magnets, doctors might need other ways to see inside us.

NOAA's geomagnetism FAQ notes that a compass points along the horizontal component of the local magnetic field, not toward any single point, and that navigators correct for declination, the angle between magnetic and true north.

In medicine, the NIH's imaging institute explains that MRI uses powerful magnets whose strong field aligns protons in the body, then radio pulses probe how they relax. The same page notes that MRI, unlike X-ray and CT imaging, does not use ionizing radiation. Those other scans might be what remained, which is an idea, not a finding.