I've known for a long time that magnets are bad for computers. I did not fully understand why, though, because I did not fully understand how my hard drive worked. The answer is a marvel of science and technology that still astonishes me. I had thought that the hard drive may have been magnetic, but had discarded this theory when considering the amount of precision required for it. Little did I know that it really was the truth. A computer's hard drive is where it stores all its data, in the form of microscopic points of positive and negative magnetic charge on the disk. To write to the disk, the computer simply needs to change the charge as necessary, and to read it just needs to detect the charges. The complexity of these rather simple-sounding tasks, though, are for another time. For now, the hard drive's magnetic properties connect with many of the warnings I see about breaking them. Though I always thought that dropping a hard drive was primarily bad because it would knock something loose in it, I now through physics understand that the force of the impact can disalign the magnetic dipoles that make up the charged areas of the disk. Electricity is terrible for the disk because the current induces a magnetic field which can easily affect the delicate arrangement of the disk's magnetism. These connections and more are just some of the ways in which physics helps me better understand the world.