The National MagLab is funded by the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida.
Watch & Play See the science at play in these electrifying demonstrations and animations that illuminate the invisible electromagnetic forces. Or have your own fun with puzzles, games and a collection of interactive tutorials.
Interactive Tutorials
These demonstrations about laws and tools associated with electricity and magnetism allow you to adjust variables at and to visualize invisible forces — which makes them almost better than the real thing.
See-Thru Science
Seeing is believing. In these animations, we show you what electricity and magnetism might look like if they weren't invisible.
Game & Quizzes
Learn about electricity and magnetism — and have some fun while you're at it!
Science Demos
How do Maglev trains work? What are comets made of? How do bugs walk on water? This section demonstrates these and other concepts related to magnetism, electricity and other areas of science.
Read Science Stories Whether you prefer science stories that are short & sweet, long & detailed, or in graphic form, these stories spell out the basics of electricity and magnetism and the exciting discoveries that magnets enable in easy-to-understand language.
Science simplified
Whether you prefer your science short & sweet or long & detailed, we spell it out for you here in easy-to-understand language.
Comic Collection
Read fun science stories told in comic strip style.
The Art of Science
There is beauty and art in science. Gaze on these stories of discoveries that could be featured on museum walls instead of scientific journals.
Left Fields
Explore these surprising, unconventional and sometimes downright strange stories about high magnetic field research.
Science Step-by-Step
These special science graphics explain science stories in digestible steps and include optional detours for readers wanting more background to customize your reading journey.
Explore History Electricity and magnetism discoveries span the centuries. Peruse the people, products and places related to electricity & magnetism from across space and time.
Pioneers
Get to know these pioneers who went down in history for their groundbreaking work, including scientists behind common terms such as Amp, Celsius, Kelvin, hertz and tesla.
Museum
From the world's first compass to the magnetic force microscope and beyond, explore a variety of instruments, tools and machines throughout history.
Timeline
Our timeline takes you through the highlights of electricity and magnetism and across the centuries.
Places
Take a field trip to these high magnetic field landmarks around the globe.
Try This at Home Science can happen anywhere! Try these hands-on science activities at home, school, club, or wherever you might find yourself! They’re easy, fun and can be done with stuff you have around the house.
Plan a Lesson Looking for a lesson plan for science class or to incorporate science concepts into other subjects? These lessons plans offer detailed directions for K12 teachers to conduct hands-on lessons and align with next generation science standards.
Alessandro Volta was an Italian scientist whose skepticism of Luigi Galvani's theory of animal electricity led him to propose that an electrical curre…
Anders Celsius is most familiar as the inventor of the temperature scale that bears his name.
Although he was not the first person to observe a connection between electricity and magnetism, André-Marie Ampère was the first scientist to attempt …
Carl Edwin Wieman is one of three physicists credited with the discovery of a fifth phase of matter, for which he was awarded a share of the prestigio…
Although he is best known as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss was also a pioneer in the study of magnetism and ele…
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invented a device, dubbed the torsion balance, that allowed him to measure very small charges and experimentally estimate …
Claude Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer whose work underlies modern information theory and helped instigate the digital revolution.
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who received half of the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his development of a new method of ascertaini…
Enrico Fermi was a titan of twentieth-century physics.
Born in Palo Alto, California, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts – homes to Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively …
Esther Conwell was a physicist and chemist known for her pioneering semiconductor science. Her research investigating the fundamental properties of se…
Physicist Felix Bloch developed a non-destructive technique for precisely observing and measuring the magnetic properties of nuclear particles.
Georg Simon Ohm had humble roots and struggled financially throughout most of his life, but the German physicist is well known today for his formulati…
A native of Germany, the physicist Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer while the pair worked togethe…
A discovery by Hans Christian Ørsted forever changed the way scientists think about electricity and magnetism.
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist who first observed the phenomenon of superconductivity while carrying out pioneering work in the field of…
At the turn of the 19th century, scientists were beginning to gain a rudimentary understanding of electricity and magnetism, but they knew almost noth…
The discovery of radio waves, which was widely seen as confirmation of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and paved the way for numerous adv…
Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer co-invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a non-optical instrument that allows the observation of individua…
Humphry Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry who used electrolysis to isolate many elements from the compounds in which they occur natu…
Isidor Isaac Rabi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his development of a technique for measuring the magnetic characteristics of atomic nucle…
J. Georg Bednorz jointly revolutionized superconductivity research with K. Alex Müller by discovering an entirely new class of superconductors, often …
The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An A…
James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century.
James Prescott Joule experimented with engines, electricity and heat throughout his life.
The Scottish instrument maker and inventor James Watt had a tremendous impact on the shape of modern society.
Although he didn't start studying physics until he retired from the clock-making business at age 30, French native Jean Peltier made immense contribut…
John Ambrose Fleming was an electronics pioneer who invented the oscillation valve, or vacuum tube, a device that would help make radios, televisions,…
John Bardeen was one of a handful of individuals awarded the Nobel Prize twice and the first scientist to win dual awards in physics.
For a man whose career involved entire known universe, John Kraus had a remarkably insular upbringing.
While still in graduate school, John Robert Schrieffer developed with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper a theoretical explanation of superconductivity that…
Joseph Henry was an American scientist who pioneered the construction of strong, practical electromagnets and built one of the first electromagnetic m…
Joseph John Thomson, better known as J. J. Thomson, was a British physicist who first theorized and offered experimental evidence that the atom was a …
Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger used the mathematical process of renormalization to rid the quantum field theory developed by Paul Dirac of ser…
In their search for new superconductors, Swiss theoretical physicist Karl Alexander Müller and his young colleague, J. Georg Bednorz, abandoned the me…
Karl Jansky, who discovered extraterrestrial radio waves while investigating possible sources of interference in shortwave radio communications across…
Klaus von Klitzing is a Nobel laureate who won the prestigious award in 1985 for his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, sometimes referred to as …
American inventor Lee De Forest was a pioneer of radio and motion pictures.
Leon Cooper shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Robert Schrieffer, with whom he developed the first widely accepted theory of…
While growing up in the Soviet Union, Lev Landau was so far ahead of his classmates that he was ready to begin college at age 13.
Luigi Galvani was a pioneer in the field of electrophysiology, the branch of science concerned with electrical phenomena in the body.
In a career that lasted seven decades, Max Planck achieved an enduring legacy with groundbreaking discoveries involving the relationship between heat …
A self-educated man with a brilliant mind, Michael Faraday was born in a hardscrabble neighborhood in London.
Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his contributions to elementary particle physics.
Awarded more than 100 patents over the course of his lifetime, Nikola Tesla was a man of considerable genius and vision.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an outstanding twentieth century theoretical physicist whose work was fundamental to the development of quantum mechanic…
Chemist Paul Lauterbur pioneered the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for medical imaging.
Peter Debye carried out pioneering studies of molecular dipole moments, formulated theories of magnetic cooling and of electrolytic dissociation, and …
Theoretical physicist Richard Phillips Feynman greatly simplified the way in which the interactions of particles could be described through his introd…
Long before his name began gracing kitchen appliances, Bosch made improvements to the magneto that had far-reaching improvements in the automobile ind…
Robert Andrews Millikan was a prominent American physicist who made lasting contributions to both pure science and science education.
Vásárosnaményi Báró Eötvös Loránd, better known as Roland EEötvös or Loránd Eötvös throughout much of the world, was a Hungarian physicist who is most…
Siegmund Loewe was a German engineer and businessman that developed vacuum tube forerunners of the modern integrated circuit.
Japanese theoretical physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga resolved key problems with the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) developed by Paul Dirac in th…
Svante Arrhenius was born in Vik, Sweden, and became the first native of that country to win the Nobel Prize.
Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser, which utilized a small synthetic rod with silvered ends to produce a narrow beam of monochroma…
Walter Houser Brattain discovered the photo-effect that occurs at the free surface of a semiconductor and was co-creator of the point-contact transist…
Walther Meissner discovered while working with Robert Ochsenfeld that superconductors expel relatively weak magnetic fields from their interior and ar…
In 1866, the research of Werner von Siemens would lead to his discovery of the dynamo electric principle that paved the way for the large-scale genera…
Researching magnetism with the great mathematician and astronomer Karl Friedrich Gauss in the 1830s, German physicist Wilhelm Weber developed and enha…
Willem Einthoven invented a string galvanometer that could be used to directly record the electrical activity of the heart.
English scientist William Crookes was very innovative in his investigations with vacuum tubes and designed a variety of different types to be used in …
William Gilbert was an English physician and natural philosopher who wrote a six-volume treatise that compiled all of the information regarding magnet…
William Bradford Shockley was head of the solid-state physics team at Bell Labs that developed the first point-contact transistor, which he quickly fo…
William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, was one of the most eminent scientists of the nineteenth century and is best known today for inventing the inte…
Austrian-born scientist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli made numerous important contributions to twentieth-century theoretical physics, including explaining the …
