A friend and I were thinking, if you start with a bar magnet and cut it in half, the poles realign into essentially another bar magnet. What if you kept splitting it in half until there was only one atom (Fe). Would that atom have a north and south pole?
Yes that's true, it would possess magnetic characteristic though less distinguishable N/S poles due to size
Simplest anser is that all info is stored in binary code and can be represented by a 0 or a 1. This used to be done by taking an actual switch and having turned on (1) or off (0). They used round donut shaped magnets on wires frames a long time ago that would flip right or left depending on the current. They new stuff with chips I'm foggier about but basically imagine someone taking a picture of a layout with thousands of boxes that can be on or off and then shrinking it way way way down and developing it and that is how a mem chip is made. I know guys this is real non tech but I am trying to make it real simple. I'm not real techhy but this is how I understand it in my mind :) USB flash drives do where out after 100,000 uses or so
There's a phenomenon called bit rot which is when the data disappears. The various formats can manifest this in different ways. Rewritable DVD fail because the writable layer corrodes. Hard-drives fail because the magnetism wears off (I think.) Flash is a newer technology, so bit rot is less studied for that.
magnets essentially exist in dipoles i.e. however smal you cut the magnet piece into there will always be a north pole and a south pole. but there is no experimental setup that can isolate one atom and test its polarity. so we have to accept the theory and consider it will behave as a magnet having two poles
First, spin is not a measure of magnetic field. It is a measure of angular momentum, which most of the sub atomic particles, not atoms, have. Whether these SAPs are actually spinning is debatable, but when their kinetic energies are carefully measured, on some of the SAPs, there is angular kinetic as well as linear KE. And that's where the spin comes in. Second, atoms have magnetic fluxes because their associated electrons are moving about. And when electrons are on the move (changing momenta), they occasionally (alpha 1/137) slough off photons. Photons are the messenger bosons that carry the electro-magnetic force. And there's your magnetism for the atoms. Finally, the reason your butt's atoms are not merging right now with the atoms in your chair's seat pan is because those atoms do have EM fields. And your butt's field and the chair's field, having the same negative charges as sources are repulsive. So that's what's keeping you from sinking into the chair. Your atoms and the chair's atoms are being kept apart by the very strong EM fields from the surface atoms on your butt and on the chair pan. So be thankful atoms are magnetic; otherwise you'd be walking around with a chair stuck to your butt. [See source.]
