Thank you!

@Longtooth – It’s good to hear from a blacksmith. I find it to be second nature to forge a knife – I can do it without thinking about it, but I couldn’t forge a spoon or a leaf if there was a cash prize for doing it. I admire blacksmithing skills. I’m glad you like the article.

@Lucas Jung – This is something I could talk about all day. We’re talking about hard and fast physical laws, so yes, you are absolutely correct, we know that if we do particular things to metal it will have measurable, predictable, and repeatable effects; both the material and our actions on it follow physical laws in a very precise manner. Gravity is a good analog to help explain my point. We know that an object falling in Earth’s gravity will accelerate at a rate of 32.2 feet per second per second until it reaches terminal velocity, and we know what an object with a known mass will weigh in Earth’s gravity with a very high degree of accuracy. But we can’t even agree (“we” being physicists, not you and I) on exactly what gravity is (sometimes described as a pulling force, sometimes a pushing force), much less on how it works. That doesn’t stop us however, from understanding its effects. IMO magnetism is as misunderstood as gravity.

I think a quick and dirty way to explain my point is that in regard to the four fundamental forces we generally understand effects much better than we understand causes and that misunderstanding extends to other areas.

Lucas, I don’t think we’re going to come up with a Grand Unification Theory on KQ, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try…

I love your articles, and this one is, as usual, very interesting. However, I do have to take issue with one of your statements:

“…but no one knows for sure how that distortion makes the metal any harder.”

Pick up any introductory-level materials science textbook and it will explain exactly how metals become harder from cold working. We have the tools to look at individual atoms and molecules within a metal, and to measure the interactions between them, and we know what’s going on in those crystalline structures. The theory may not be perfect in every detail, but the general mechanisms are well understood.

To explain the varying magnetic properties of steel at different temperatures, you would probably need a more advanced textbook, but that answer is out there, too. That being said, I really like the way you used the non-intuitiveness of it as a way to work magic into the picture.