Every Textbook Was Wrong About Magnets

Look at the magnet on your fridge. For about a hundred years, every textbook said there were only two kinds of magnets. They were wrong. A third kind — altermagnetism — was hiding in plain sight inside hundreds of materials, and this month the physicists who found it won the 2026 Europhysics Prize. In this episode, in plain language and zero equations: • where magnetism really comes from: every electron is a tiny compass needle (spin) • why iron stops being a magnet above ~770 °C • ferromagnets: compasses, hard drives, the 2007 Nobel Prize and spintronics • antiferromagnets: hidden, fast, more common — and "interesting but useless" (Néel, 1970) • the third kind: a city of one-way streets where electrons are sorted by spin • the hunt: hundreds of candidates, manganese telluride (2024), magnetic whirlpools, a 2-nm stretched film (2026) • honest caveats: no altermagnet computer yet, and "1000× faster" is a hope, not a measurement • why it matters: memory that's fast, dense, magnet-proof and readable Chapters: 0:00 The magnet on your fridge 0:39 Where magnetism comes from 1:43 Kind #1: ferromagnets 3:01 Kind #2: antiferromagnets 4:35 The third kind: altermagnets 5:59 The hunt 6:50 Now, careful 7:22 Why it matters 8:19 Think about it What's something ordinary in your life that you suspect is secretly much stranger than it looks? Tell me in the comments, and subscribe for more strange physics. #physics #magnetism #science