Magnetic Attraction

I’ve been musing about magnets recently and I have a number of questions about them … particularly magnetic flux lines. I've read the Wikipedia entry (magnetic field) and, if anything, it needs an application of Occam's razor.  Now if anyone has any more understandable answers to these queries please respond (to muser@tiac.net) or comment:

- What exactly are flux lines (a force field, potential energy, streams of electrons or some subparticles, etc)?
- If it is a force field, why don't other force fields, like gravity, exhibit such flux lines?
- What geometric shape do flux lines take? A catenary?
- Are the flux lines of a strong magnet closer together than those of a weak magnet?
- If this is the case, can a magnet be made so strong that its flux lines become a flux plasma?
- Are the flux lines (pure) force or is there any matter therein however minute (even in theory)?
- How far out do flux lines extend from the magnet and is this a function of the magnet’s strength?
- Must flux lines always connect north-to-south or can they extend out to infinity?
- If there is a limit to flux line extension, does this mean that no flux lines can come out of a magnet absolutely and directly along the line of its orientation?
- Are all the flux lines of a single magnet of equal attractive strength?
- If the Earth’s magnetic flux lines lie along its surface, why don’t they disrupt things (other than to point a compass)? One would think that, if they can deflect cosmic rays out in space, they would create more mischief here on terra firma?
- Do flux lines extend into the magnet itself (in other words would a compass point north if one went down into a deep mine)?
- If flux lines do extend inside a magnet, what happens at the exact center point of the magnet?
- Does magnetism exist, as I suspect, at the atomic level?
- If so, what atomic structural characteristic makes an atom or molecule magnetic?
- Are all metallic elements magnetic even minutely?
- Can gases be magnetic?
- What was the strongest magnet ever made? Why?
- Why does moving a conductor across the flux lines of a magnet produce electricity? Does such movement need to be exactly orthogonal … or at what angle does this effect disappear?
- If the Earth’s molten core were eventually to solidify, would it still be magnetic?

Enough?