Why the two poles of a magnet are considered Inseparable
Answers
Every day bonding of substances depends on electric and magnetic effects or their combined electromagnetic effects.
Let us start with electric effects. A Van de Graaf generator has a large metal dome. Insulate your feet from the floor with rubber shoes and put your hands on the dome, assuming it has lost electrons and is positively charged. ( You get exactly the same effect if the dome gained electrons and was negatively charged ).
The girl’s hair must be very fine and very dry.
What we observe is that the girl’s hair sticks out in all directions.
To describe this strange event we invent the word “charge”.
We do not know what charge is, but we do know the effects that it causes.
Charge is like personality. We do not know what personality is but it makes a person interesting.
Think of charge as the “personality” of an electron.
The girl’s hair sticking out is charge on a big scale. So let us go down to charge on a small scale and we get an object represented by a circle with a whole lot of electric field lines sticking out in all directions. ( See diagram above ).
The key idea is that charges can be separated.
You can put a lot of excess positive charges on one terminal of a battery and an equal number of excess negative charges on the other separate terminal of the battery.
The circle on the right ( in the above diagram ) can represent one positive charge ( a proton ) and we represent its electric field as pointing outwards. A tiny positive test charge tends to follow the field lines as it is repelled by the positive charge.
The law is basic. Charges produce forces on each other. Like charges produce repulsive forces. Opposite charges produce attractive forces.
The key idea for electric charge is that you can isolate a single charge and all the electric field lines around that charge all go in the same direction, either outwards or inwards.
Please note from the above diagram. There are no electric charge lines inside the circular object. Electric charge lives only on the outside surface of a charged container. There is no charge inside the container.
