Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism

I could be wrong but as I understand it. You know magnetism based on positive and negative poles, now they can read and write SPIN, which is another property of electrons (that are in everything, even things nonmagnetic). If it's true, and scales, we could use non-ferrous better materials to achieve what we do currently with ferrous materials.

chatgpt can eli5 summarize. who knows if its accurate enough

I have no idea about the numbering, but I know of at least

• Ferromagnetism (like a fridge magnet)
• Antiferromagnetism (opposite of ferromagnetism at an atomic level)
• Diamagnetism (makes superconductors float)
• Paramagnetism (like that spinny frog)

These all indicate how a material reacts to a magnetic field. This article discusses "altermagnetism", which is somewhere between ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.

Yeah, Paramagnetism.

Unironically, magnetism is similar to charge, which is similar to mass.

You (probably) wouldn't ask "But why does an atom weigh anything?" or "why do opposite charges attract?" All these things are just intrinsic properties of matter: they just have them.

So the answer to questions regarding why anything has mass/charge/magnetic moment really come down to "they just do."

Now, if you want to talk about how and why magnets work at a macroscopic scale, we can have a long and interesting chat about long range ordering and phase transitions, but I'll leave that for now :)