Slashdot Mirror
Monopoles and Magnetricity
szotz writes "Although there was once a hint from a cosmic ray experiment (on Valentine's Day, no less), no one's found any solid evidence of monopoles (unpaired north and south magnets) flying around the cosmos. But physicists did find monopole-like quasiparticles in some exotic crystals in 2009. One of the discoverers has an article this month in IEEE Spectrum that looks at how the particles were found and what's happened since. They might seem like a wacky curiosity, but the author says we shouldn't write them off — they might one day make useful new 'magnetronic' devices."
Dr. Sheldon Cooper already explained all this...
Microsoft is a convicted monopole, aren't they?
as well as massive temporal and gravimetric disturbances inside a Class 5 subspace anomaly???
Larry Niven has gone into a great deal of theoretical depth on monopoles. Worth reading
Requires Superstring Theory, Silksteel Alloys
Leads to Nanominiaturization, Unified Field Theory
Question for any physicists in the audience: I have long heard that magnetic forces can be described as relativistic effects of classical electricity (here, for instance). How do magnetic monopoles fit into this? Are they are purely quantum mechanics/QFT concept, or is there some way to describe them classically that makes it clear why so many people are expecting to find them?
Visit the
No news.
If you voted for Nader, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!
As a followup to the excellent relativistic answer above...
As one of my professors put it: "if there is one monopole anywhere, then charge is quantized everywhere". This was at the end of a fairly straightforward derivation, first done by Paul Dirac IIRC.
We see by experiment that charge is quantized everywhere, but this doesn't prove the existence of monopoles. It's a tantalizing clue to why things may be the way they are in our universe.
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
How can you know that downmods are coming from homosexuals? It could be from your observance frame as a mono-sexual that all higher order sexual behaviors appear different but similar in relation to one another and thus appear to be homogenous when they are, in fact, not.
How would a monopole differ from an electron?
F#$%ing Monopoles, how do they work?
fucking magnetronics, how does it work?
I maintain nonetheless that yin-yang dualism can be overcome.
With sufficient enlightenment we can give substance to any
distinction: mind without body, north without south, pleasure
without pain. Remember, enlightenment is a function of willpower,
not of physical strength.
—Chairman Sheng-ji Yang,
“Essays on Mind and Matter”
How do magnetic monopoles fit into this?
Magnetic monopoles could be the mechanism by which charge is quantized. Dirac showed in 1931 that if monopoles exist then charge, quite naturally becomes quantized through the fact that angular momentum is quantized. Unfortunately Dirac's mechanism puts no mass limits on real monopoles (i.e. not the condensed matter faked kind) but there is an experiment (MoEDAL) being run by a colleague of mine which is searching for evidence of monopole production at the LHC. However, if they exist, they could lie anywhere up to the planck scale which is about a quadrillion [10^15] times higher in energy than the LHC so it is probably unlikely that they will find them but if they do it would be an incredible discovery and it was a very cheap experiment to build (if you exclude the cost of the LHC itself!).
Monopoles are predicted by some of the unified theories, so if they exist how come we don't see any?
For example proton decay might be possible through hypothesized X and Y bosons which have masses around 100 times less than the Planck scale (so-called GUT scale). The current limit on the proton lifetime is 6.6e33 years (for reference the age of the universe is 1.3e10 years i.e. 23 orders of magnitude less) and it is only possible to get such limits because of the huge numbers of protons we have available (hydrogen nuclei in water). So to really probe monopoles you would need to have a process which is forbidden by Standard Model physics but which is allowed by monopoles and which you can easily search for with a very low background and which has lots of possibilities for it to occur because, if it occurs at all, it will be an incredibly rare process!
I'm sure monopole-like virtual particles are cool and all, but the article is very light on describing what exactly what the ability to produce magnetic current means in practical terms.
All theories are useful hallucinations and nothing more. The map is not the territory. Each useful map will only take you to certain limited portions of the territory. I think that what Ed had going for him more than anything was that he had no map to start with.
We must stop this dangerous research before hoards of roaming bandits start falling up! It's unconstitutional and immoral, I'm telling ya.
Table-ized A.I.
And thatâ(TM)s not all. Because each vertex of a tetrahedron is also shared with a neighbor, the spin that violates the ice rule in one tetrahedron would also do so in another, creating a second monopole one tetrahedron away with the opposite polarity.
So there are two virtual monopoles right next to each other. Sounds like a dipole to me. I don't know enough physics to know if that's even slightly interesting.
Electrons are point source charges thus a monopole.
Jeeeish..
what happens when there's a magnetic power outage?
:// Colon Slash Slash http://siamesecat1.neocities.org/colonslash.html
What about bottomless pits?
If we could find just one, all our garbage disposal problems would be solved!
Only religion can understand god.
Only god can understand science.
Only science can understand religion.