[TooKool4This]

After working in a particularly magnetics heavy project at work an analogue that I found works better is picturing the flux lines as “fluidic” and emulating common fluid behavior. For example, having a ferromagnetic material within a magnetic field is like having a funnel in a fluid stream. Taking this analogue along with an intuitive understanding of Maxwell’s equations really gives you an intuitive understanding of magnetics for applied sciences (ie DivB = 0 means that in any bounded region the number of field lines entering = number of field lines leaving).

Of course all of this is only good up to the point you start looking at magnetics at the material science level. Then you really need to internalize it is a quantum mechanics effect and commit to learning the hard science behind it.

Veritasium has a good video on the “levels of explanation” of magnetic fields and you really need to decide how deep you want to go.