I’m thinking of a magnet, at the end of a cable, hanging from the boom of the toy crane which Daddy brought for me.
“Watch this,” he said, as he pulled a nail out of his pocket and laid it on the floor , then he backed the crane up, swiveled the boom into position, and winched the magnet down. It touched the nail, but did not pick it up.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?”
“Let’s find out,” he said, “hold the nail up to the magnet.”
I did so, but the nail still didn’t stick.
“Is the magnet broken, Daddy?” I asked.
“No, son,” he smiled.
“Why won’t it grab the nail?”
“Because this magnet is electrical,” he said. “If we were in a steel-yard, and this was just a regular magnet,” he said, “you could pick up a piece of steel, but how would you drop it ?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if you had a magnet you could turn on and off?”
“That would do it,”I smiled.
“Look here,” he continued, as he opened a metal door,showed me the Ray-O-Vac battery, then closed the door, which must have held the switch.
“Push that switch “on,’” Daddy said.
So I pushed.
“Now lower your magnet down to the nail.”
“Whoa,” I laughed, as the nail jumped up onto the magnet.
Then Daddy got up, emptied a box of kitchen matches and brought it over.
“Now winch the electro-magnet all the way up, and swivel it over this box.”
I did so… then pushed the switch to “off,” before he told me to.
The nail dropped down, bounced off the edge of the box, and landed on the table.
We both laughed.
When I held the nail to the magnet again, and turned the switch on, the magnet grabbed the nail. When I turned the switch off, the nail fell away.
“What makes the magnet turn on and off,” I asked.
Daddy pried the metal cover off, to show me a magnet, which looked like a doughnut made of insulated wire. The end of the wires ran to the battery box.
“When the switch is on, the electricity runs through the coil of wire, and turns that steel washer into a magnet,” he said. “When the switch is off, the electricity can’flow, so the magnet goes back to being just a plain old washer wrapped in wire.”
“Let’s see what the magnetic field looks like,” he said, probably by filing some slivers off a piece of iron onto a piece of paper.
“I’ll hold the paper up, and you hold the boom magnet under the filings,” he said.
I turned the boom magnet on, then moved it up to the paper. The filings took the shape of the doughnut wires. When I moved the magnet, the filings followed.
“We have that magnetic force in us, too,” he said.
“Mama’s got it,” I said.
“She does?” Daddy replied.“How do you know, son?”
“When her watch stopped, the jeweler said her body put out so much magnetism, the wheels couldn’t turn.”
Daddy looked over at mama, and smiled. “She can stop a clock?”
“No, sir,” I said, missing the joke. “She magnetized her watch and it quit running.”
Daddy looked back over at Mama. “She has a magnetic personality,” he chuckled.
Then he must have laid an iron penny onto the notebook paper. The penny followed the magnet’s every move. Then he would have replaced the grey penny with a copper one, which the magnet would not move at all.
“Why won’t the brown penny move?” I asked.
“A magnetic field will pull iron and steel, but not copper,” he said.
I must have remembered this story, the other day, when I found couple of permanent magnets stuck together. I tried to pull them apart, but the magnetic force was so strong, that I could only slide them apart. When I finally got them free, I turned one of them over, then tried to force them back together…I could not do so, for the magnetic force was too strong.
“Where are you going with this?” you may ask. Just here: radio and television messages can be superimposed onto an alternating electromagnetic signal, amplified and sent to a satelllite antenna 22,000 miles above the equator, to be transmitted back to small dish antennas on earth.
Our hearts generate electromagnetic signals to regulate their beats, which can be heard through a stethoscope, and our thoughts generate electromagnetic brain waves which can be viewed through electro-encephalograms.
In addition, under certain circumstances our thoughts may behave like radio signals and leave our bodies.
“Mr.Smith, you’re not going to believe this,” students often said while I was teaching, “I can’t turn my paper in because the printer messed up.”
I was sceptical of such arguments until I read of an experiment, in which a computer was programed to produce random numbers, ones with no logical connection to one another. The researchers wanted to find out if a human being could influence the machine. Sure enough, when anxious persons came to use the machine, the numbers took on a non-random pattern.
As the researchers concluded that the person’s anxious thoughts influenced their computer, so my students’ desperation may have influenced their computer printer.
But thoughts don’t have to remain anxious ones, for when I think of the goodness of my Dad, and remember the goodness of the Spirit of God, Who gave him to me, I become happy. Then I remember that God is Light, and that light is the ultimate form of electromagnetism.
That way I am able to influence undesirable feelings —the ones I receive and the ones I make on my own— and to send them to God, when I think of them as iron filings pulled to an Infinitely powerful Magnet, whose electromagnetic Goodness, they cannot resist. His switch is always on.
I turn my switch off, by deciding to let those feelings go.