Thanks.

Somehow an entire generation of teachers just decided that magnets don't attract or repel each other.

Those blatantly wrong things that somehow people still insist on teaching are ridiculous.

You are correct about which book the quote is from. Idk about Jackson's books so can't say anything.

I tried to include the explaination (tbh I dont get it fully still) in the title that technically its true bc 'something else does the work' (hence the title)

IIRC it depends on the frame of reference. Relative to a magnetic field, the only thing a magnetic force does is changing the velocity direction of affected objects. All work regarding the absolute magnitude of the velocity is zero (no lateral acceleration).

It's usually said about a charge under a magnetic feild. The magnetic force goes perpendicular to the direction of motion of the charge(F=qv×B*). Work is done only if the force is applied along the direction of motion. So on a moving charge, magnetic force does no work.

Not sure how that plays on magnets though. Magnets are magnetic because electrons go in circles producing the feild, and it might be because electric feild comes in and do the work but it's not clear for me either

The title is the punchline. Magnets move things with their fields, the magnet itself doesn't need to apply force on the things it moves. 'work' is a physics term for applying a force over a distance.

I just did a quick read on it on it. “Work” is the application of force over time in the direction the object is moving. Pushing a shopping cart for example is work, because you have to constantly apply force to it.

From what I’ve read, it seems that magnetic force doesn’t do work because it doesn’t apply force in the direction the object moves. Magnetic force only “deflects” or changes the direction of an object with an existing velocity. It’s only a deflection because the force applied is always perpendicular to the direction of the velocity.

To use the previous shopping cart example, picture a shopping cart that already has a forward velocity that passes a magnet. The magnet only applies a force to the side of the cart towards the magnet. This doesn’t push the cart itself, but changes the direction of its velocity towards the magnet.