- #1
snoopies622
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I'm reading about the Stern–Gerlach experiment and the only part that confuses me is how a magnetic field would deflect particles with magnetic dipoles instead of just rotating them. In this case the magnetic field is non-uniform, but it still seems intuitively strange to me since magnetic field lines around the particles are always closed, and so I imagine that any magnetic field would have a kind of translational net zero effect on them. Would this translational force also appear if I tossed a macroscopic bar magnet through a non-linear magnetic field? (Say, one that always pointed in the same direction but increased in strength in a spacially linear way.)