@citrustwee normal normal or mastodon normal?

@cambrian_era however if you have a material where the electron spins can all become coherent, like iron, then you can get the little magnetic fields to add up instead of canceling out, and then you get a magnet.

@cambrian_era so, electron spin induces a local magnetic field. the magnetic field is kind of torus-shaped (like from a regular dipole magnet) and the direction of the field is dependent on the direction of the spin. this is called the “electron magnetic dipole moment.” usually these spins are all incoherent and so they cancel out at the level of the material, and you only have the little local magnetic fields.