1.

3 Getting Acquainted: Magnetite 7

fields takes clever design, and a lot of money and electric power. There
are renowned high-field laboratories (Grenoble, Tallahassee, Tokyo, Am-
sterdam, etc.) which are visited by researchers wishing to do experi-
ments in intense magnetic fields. However, these human achievements
are dwarfed by what Nature can do: the magnetic field at the surface
of a pulsar is estimated to be 108T.N

1.3 Getting Acquainted: Magnetite

By the time we finish our studies of classical electromagnetism we ap-
preciate that magnetism, and magnetic fields, are not among the most
straightforward phenomena we meet in this world. It is a piece of good
luck that nature offered mankind an immediate sensuous experience4
of what magnetism is about in the form of a mineral that you can
pick up from the ground. A strongly magnetic material, magnetite,
has been known since millenia5; its old-fashioned name (‘lodestone” (or
“loadstone”) should be understood as “leading stone”, referring to the
magnetic compass. Most of the ancient civilizations knew about lode-
stone; it never ceased to be a source of wonder for people who cared to
wonder about such things. Do we, by now, know all about magnetite
that there is to know?
Not at all, you will discover. Certainly we know a lot, but the more
carefully you look, the more complicated the substance seems to get.
This is a not uncommon experience, but magnetite appears to offer a
larger collection of curious features than many of the related compounds.
In view of this, and of the role magnetite played in the history of the
subject, it is perhaps not a bad idea to begin a course on magnetism
with a first attempt to understand the gross features of magnetite6.
A word of warning should be given before we start. Magnetite is
complicated. Some of the conceptual difficulties posed by its description
4T0really appreciate this, let us recall that it is commonly held that the world
of tangible objects, which we directly feel and see, is classical and non-relativistic.
Well, ma8netism turns out to be essentially quantum-mechanical and relativistic!
‘For a fascinating account of the historical background, cf. Ch. 1. of f264]. See
also [429], and [50].
‘Here we assume the reader’s familiarity with the crystalline, and magnetic, struc-
ture of Fe304 from the basic course on solid state physics (see Ch. 16 of [209]).