So if anyone actually wants to know how magnetism works, I figured I should give it a shot since its better than doing research right now.

Essentially, it comes down to two things: quantum mechanics (which describes the motion of microscopic particles) and relativity (which describes the motion of particles moving near the speed of light). It turns out that, relativity implies that a moving charge creates a magnetic field. What is a magnetic field you might ask? On a some level, a magnetic field is just something that you have to write down so that if you wiggle one charged particle, like an electron, another charged particle nearby wiggles in a very specific way that is confirmed by experiments.

If you take a small particle and move it around in a tight little circle, the magnetic field that it creates has a special name, called a dipole. You can think of a dipole as being a very small bar magnet. Just like everyday magnets, they have north and south poles that want to align the magnetics in the same direction (as well as pull them together) when north pole of one is placed near the south pole another, but misaligns them when they're placed next to each other.

It turns out that electrons like all particles, speaking very roughly, have an intrinsic rotation called "spin" predicted by quantum mechanics, and because the elections are charged, you might expect that just like a particle moving in a tight little loop, it creates a magnetic dipole field. In fact it, does, and this is way magnetism in everyday matter exists. Along with electrons, protons and neutrons have the same type of intrinsic rotation as electrons, but because they're so big, it turns out that the magnetic field they produce is tiny; again speaking roughly this is because they're so large that they don't have to rotate as quickly in order to have the same angular momentum, so they create a smaller magnetic field than electrons. All of the magnetism that you're used too comes essentially from electrons and their interactions with one another.

But that's not the whole story. The other important part comes from quantum mechanics. It turns out that, independently of the fact that two charged particles repel each other, two electrons can't occupy the same state as each other, which is called the pauli exclusion principle. Because quantum mechanically the spin or dipole moment of an electron either points up or points down (just these two possibilities! very weird) the electrons have two: either two electrons point in the same direction, or they point in opposite directions. If they point in the same direction, the pauli principle says that they can't occupy the same region, but if they point in opposite directions, they can can occupy the same space. Of course, electrons have the same charge so they repel each other so its better if they aren't in the same spatial region; therefore the electron spins tend to point in the same direction. This is called an exchange interaction.

So here's what happens in everyday magnets. Usually in these, each atom of the magnet has an odd number of electrons so the whole atom has a net magnetic dipole. The magnetic dipoles of two adjacent atoms interact with each other just like i described above. However, if this was the only way atoms interact, we would not have macroscopic (human scale) magnets since the two magnetic dipoles want to point in opposite directions for some orientations of the two dipoles. In addition, however, the electrons in an atom tend to align their dipole moments with the electrons in a neighboring atom because of the exchange interaction, and if the exchange interaction is large enough, depending on the specific types of atoms/how close they are, all of the magnetic moments point in the same direction! This is a beautiful example of microscopic interactions (on the order of an angstrom or 10^-10 m) give rise to order on a macroscopic length scale (a few centimeters), as well as something rather profound called spontaneous symmetry breaking

This kind of magnetism is called ferromagnetism. Sometimes in ferromagnets the normal wiggling of atoms at room temperature make it impossible for the little magnetic dipole moments to pick one direction to line up in, and there's no net magnetism. However, if you apply large magnetic field you can overcome this wiggling and create a whats called a paramagnet. This is what's happening when you put an iron magnet next to, say a paper clip, and the paper clip is attracted to the iron: you've created a temporary magnet in the paper clip that eventually disappears because of the normal wiggling of and the dipole interactions between the paper clip atoms. In other types of materials the magnetic field actually effects the orbits of electrons in addition to their little magnetic orientations. These are called diamagnets, and it turns out that they respond to magnet field in the opposite way: they tend to reduce magnetic field due to an adjacent piece of iron, rather than enhance it like other magnets. A super cool example of this are superconductors. In normal kinds of metals the movement of electrons try to cancel applied magnetic field, but the charged atoms of the metal are wiggling a lot and knock the atoms around too much. But if you cool a superconductor down to low enough temperatures, the electrons actually form special pairs and can move around in little circles without getting knocked around. Just like in diamagnets, magnetic dipole fields are produced by these little circulating electron pairs and actually completely cancel the applied field. The result is that the magnets actually float in midair:

meissner effect

Other times, if the exchange interaction is weak enough, and the shape of the magnet is right, the dipole moments aren't strong enough to pick one overall direction and the magnet forms little regions called domains, where there is a net magnetic moment but different domains can have different directions even if they're right next to each other. This is how modern hard drives work- the little domains point in two directions corresponding to 1s and 0s.

So I strongly doubt anyones made it this far, but what the hell, it was a good break from research! Plus I need attention.

And if you haven't seen this, Feynman the man explains it a lot better than I can:

feynman on magnets