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Physics
Classical Physics
Electromagnetism
What actually makes a magnetic field?
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[QUOTE="Drakkith, post: 6005615, member: 272035"] Forget you ever read that. It's a watered down explanation of virtual particles, which require a substantial background in quantum physics (and the math underlying it) to understand. I wouldn't try to think of it that way. A [URL='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_(physics)']field[/URL] is a way of particular representing something using math. For example, we could measure the wind velocity at ten feet above the ground at many points across a wide area. This wind velocity field could then be represented by a 2D grid or a table of values, much like how they show the weather on weather channels. The magnetic field is one part of the electromagnetic field and contains the values of the magnetic field vectors for each point in space. These vectors represent the direction and magnitude of the magnetic forces a charged particle would feel. And that's pretty much it. The magnetic field is just the way we model the forces a charged particle would feel. There's nothing else underlying the electromagnetic field that you could use to explain it. You could try to invoke quantum physics, but that's not going to change the explanation drastically at this level since we aren't worried about the mathematical details in this thread. I'd like to stress again that the magnetic field (and the EM field as a whole) is a way of modeling or representing how charged particles interact. It's something that we created to help us explain the world and there may be alternative ways of representing these interactions without using fields. That wouldn't change anything about the underlying physical laws of the universe, it would only change how we explain and represent them. [/QUOTE]
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Electromagnetism
What actually makes a magnetic field?
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