Question: Can you pull apart an atom with incredibly strong magnets?

Flavia de Almeida Dias answered on 17 Nov 2015:

No, I don’t think so. But you can do cool stuff when submitting atoms to electric and magnetic fields, and that can tell us more about the atom’s structure!

One of these is what we call the Stark effect – named after Johannes Stark, a german physicist, not Tony Stark, the Iron Man. When we put an atom inside an electric field, we can see one of their properties – which we call spectral lines – to split!

Something similar – Zeeman effect – is what happens when you put the atom in a magnetic field. It is analogous to the Stark effect, the splitting of a spectral line into several components.

Both of those effects can tell us details about the formation of the atoms, because the number of spectral lines it divides to tell us how “degenerate” a state is – in this case it does not mean something bad, but it means that two or more different states of a quantum mechanical system give the same value of energy upon measurement.