Experiment: Checking Biot-Savart's Law

[pardesi]

how does one experimentally check biot-savart's law

 

[olgranpappy]

Maybe you could time travel back to the early 19th century when people actually cared?

Or you could enroll in a freshman physics laboratory class where no one cares about anything.

 

[pardesi]

no isn't it imp...
well why i asked is it holds only for 'thin' wires and are the wires which we normally use sufficient to test it's validity

 

[ZapperZ]

Why can't you just measure the magnetic field strength and see if it matches the theoretical calculations at that particular position?

Besides, like Coulomb's Law, isn't B-S law a phenomenological law historically? So it CAME out of experimental observations in the first place.

Zz.

 

[Meir Achuz]

how does one experimentally check biot-savart's law

The differential form of the B-S law cannot be tested, but can only be inferred from the integral form. The integral form was first written down by Laplace, based on the experiments of B and S with closed circuits. Because of its general nature, it can only be confirmed for specific cases (always passing so far) but not "proven" in general.

 

[pardesi]

thanks for that i just wanted to see the experiments behind it ...
and ofcourse not a 'proof'