3 ms·
The one misleading thing about iron fillings is that they tend to arrange themselves into lines, but the actual magnetic field is continuous rather than made ou
by FreeFull 9y ago
The one misleading thing about iron fillings is that they tend to arrange themselves into lines, but the actual magnetic field is continuous rather than made out of discrete lines.
- msla 9y agoThat is, in a sense, just calculus: Building a curve out of a huge number of straight segments is immediately comparable to the method of Riemann sums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_sum I think it forms a nice bridge from univariate calculus to visualizing the vector fields.
- tlarkworthy 9y agoIt's not that though. The iron filing change the magnetic field making it denser where the filing are. So they self organize into reenforcing channels of flux. So it's not a true visualization of the field, because the field is changed by the measurements.
- noobermin 9y agoUseless pedantic then, it is not a "true visualization" of the B field in free space absent the filings. It is however, an approximate visualization of it.