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."

Comments

Modswell's Demon

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Define "useful"

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

Re:Monopole Magnets

[Roger W Moore]

Pierre Curie pointed out the possibility of magnetic monopoles in 1894 based solely on Maxwell's equations which was close to a century before Superstring theory was on the scene. In fact in 1931 Dirac showed they could be used to quantize charge using nothing but relativistic quantum mechanics and Maxwell's equations. So monopoles actually only require Maxwell's equations and would lead to an explanation of why charge is quantized. It may come as a shock but the real world does not play like Alpha Centauri (and considering what happened to Earth in that game that's a good thing!).

Re:Monopole Magnets

[Noughmad]

So monopoles actually only require Maxwell's equations and would lead to an explanation of why charge is quantized.

Not, not really. Maxwell's equations, in the known form, do not allow for magnetic monopoles. They are explicitly forbidden by "div B = 0". However, they could very easily be changed (symmetrized - so they would look the same for electric and magnetic fields) to account for them.

So just from Maxwell's equation you can't disprove the existence of monopoles, but you can't prove them either.