How to know whether magnetic field is inwards or outwards?
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Mentor The "line" of the magnetic field is well-defined, but the choice of the "forwards" and "backwards" directions is arbitrary and has to be defined by convention, that is, it has to be agreed on by everyone who uses magnetic fields, and it has to be applied consistently in all situations. Historically, the first application of magnetism was in compasses for finding direction, and so I suspect that the direction of → B B→ at a given location was originally defined as the direction that the north-seeking end of a compass needle points when placed at that location. If most of civilization (or at least the part that first started to use magnetic compasses) had arisen in the Earth's southern hemisphere, we might very well have used the south-seeking end of a compass needle to define the direction of → B B→, instead.
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