Question

Why does a current carrying conductor behave like a magnet?

What happens at the microscopic level?

Answer 1

When a current flows through a conductor, charges move with a high speed. At high speed, the notion of distance and time changes. Distance appears to become smaller and time gets delayed. So in actual, what appears to be a magnetic field is actually electric field only but due to change of the notion of time and distance, we feel it as a new type of force that is a magnetic force due to this current carrying conductor behave like a magnet.


at the microscopic level, it also behaves like a magnet, but there will less magnetic field so the magnetic effect will less.