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Making Magnetic Monopoles and Other Physics Exotica
PhysicsDavid writes "Physicists have been searching for magnetic monopoles pretty much since they knew about magnetism and definitely since Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism. Now some researchers have shown that using some weird mirror materials will allow them to create something indistinguishable from a monopole in a lab experiment. A paper about it was published today in the journal Science as an advance online publication (abstract; full article available only to AAAS members). The technique looks like it could be used to create analog systems of other kinds of exotic particles that haven't yet been observed, such as axions. The theorists who proposed this are working with experimenters to try to create these systems and study them in depth this year."
I can see how you might confuse photons with zune users.
div B = 0
equation were modified to read, say
div B = rho_m / mu_0
in analogy to Gauss' law. The defining qualities of Maxwell's model, such as the compliance with relativity, would remain intact.
For further reading on this, David J. Griffiths' 'Introduction to Electrodynamics' is many a professor's first recommendation to students.
If it turns out that you can create something indistinguishable from a magnetic monopole, then we have to start some very serious research into the implications.
This is "indistinguishable" from a monopole in the same way that an image in a mirror is "indistinguishable" from the real object. While extremely interesting there will be bound to be edge effects given the finite size of the mirror and there must physically be a second pole somewhere because the material cannot spontaneously acquire a net magnetic charge...unless there is some significant new physics occuring. Hence I would take "indistinguishable" with a very large grain of salt. It is an extremely interesting result though.
There's an instructable for making magnetic Monopoly right here. As for finding the physics erotica, your on your own--I'm at work right now...
This guy's the limit!
I think he is referring to the way that Feynmann diagrams allow you to represent an antiparticle as being a particle moving backwards in time. A particle/antiparticle pair then just becomes one particle going forwards and backwards in a loop. There was some talk that this way of looking at it may be physically real and that all particles are one, but taking a really circuitious route through time. It doesn't hold up well because there isn't enough antimatter around to allow it as far as we can see. I'm not sure it was ever supposed to apply to photons in any case.
That's easy. Take a regular magnet and cut it in half, gees do I have to do all the heavy thinking around here.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Now, do we go for Unified Field Theory and get tachyon bolt weapons, or Nanominiaturization and score the hovertank chassis?
I thought it still sort of worked for photons, cos they are their own anti-particle.
My party piece is to bore anyone who will listen with an argument that the universe only needs one photon travelling backwards and forwards in time.
But the WTFs are usually reserved for the followup where I set fire to my head.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Most notably, if even a single magnetic monopole exists in the universe, electric charge quantization is the result, as shown by Dirac in 1931. We currently don't really actually know why the hell things are quantized, so that would be ...interesting. If anything, it's a bit peculiar that electric charge is quantized given that we haven't seen magnetic monopoles to date (of course if electric charge wasn't quantized we wouldn't exist... but anyway...)
Quantization in general is weird and inelegant and ugly (the maths is just horrible and shitty compared to the pure background-independent elegance of general relativity or einstein-cartan (general relativity with spin, basically)), but demonstration of the existence of magnetic monopoles would go some way to making it less ugly.
Traveling north or south becomes much cheaper than heading east or west?
Bigger than that... A real magnetic monopole means real over-unity generators (aka "perpetual motion", aka "free energy"). That alone makes me take this "discovery" with a grain of salt the size of Bonneville.
If this amounts to more than sloppy science or outright fraud, I would guess that it comes with the same sort of huge disclaimer that quantum teleportation has regarding FTL information transmission - "It just doesn't work that way".
Back when I was designing magnetic bubble memory we used to use monopole equations to represent the bubbles.
No violation of physics here because they were always paired. But the pairs in the media are well separated so it's a btter approximation to use two monopoles than a dipole.
That is to say, each bubble is really a cyllinder running from the bottom of the thin film to the top just like it is in vertical recording HD. You can treat the top as a monopole and the bottom as an opposite monopole and get a very good model of bubble-to-bubble interactions.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Hey - you're not meant to complain about Slashdot Pole options!
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.