COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT
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It’s always the way. Here I am, trying to ease my readers’ burden by cleansing their lives of extraneous details, and some nitpicker comes along and says you forgot to talk absolute zero, Brownian motion, and the influence of William Faulkner. I figured I could skip a discussion of the paramagnetic materials, which are what you’re talking about. As you know, all materials in some respects can be thought of as containing tiny magnets. (If nothing else, they contain electrons, the mother of all magnetism.) What I should have said, perhaps, was that aluminum doesn’t contain tiny magnets of any practical consequence.
I did take simplification too far in one respect, though. I singled out unfilled inner electron shells as the key to iron magnetism. Important as these are, they’re only half the story. The other half, however, has to do with quantum mechanical effects that even specialists have a difficult time explaining clearly. I figured if I kept mum about them nobody would notice. Silly me. So let’s try again–and remember, you asked for this.
