Category: Articles

The Hidden Vector Field Behind Magnetic Monopoles

Magnetism: Do’s and don’ts

Have you ever heard about magnetic monopoles? It’s what you thought you’d get when you break apart a bar magnet as a little kid.

The bar magnet is a dipole (2-pole), because it has 1 north and 1 south pole. A magnetic monopole would be … well … a mono-pole, having 1 north or 1 south pole.

However, ordinary nature doesn’t seem to like the idea of monopoles so much. In fact, James C. Maxwell (a.k.a. the godfather of electrodynamics, 1831–1879) expressed this fact mathematically more than 150 years ago. Heaviside (1850–1925), both a genius engineer and mathematician, later invented modern vector calculus and stepped in to re-express it as:

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No right-hand rule. No Maxwell. Just clean logic.

Introduction

As engineers and physicists, we all know that magnetic fields come in closed loops. So an image like this won’t surprise us much:

However, the actual reason why the magnetic field appears circular like that is less well known.

That’s why, when a friend once asked me that exact question, I couldn’t give a straight answer. But that was a few years back, and today I’ll finally give it a shot.

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