Starship Asterisk*

If field lines were purely conceptual aids, one could pick any path parallel to the field and all such paths would be equivalent. But this is not right either! We see charged particles (and magnetic particles) concentrated along specific lines. These lines appear to be relatively permanent, they mov...

Hi Qev, Field lines may be analagous to contours on a map, but they are not the same thing. Think about contours, as you move from one line to the next the height changes smoothly. This is not the case with field lines. The lines are places of high magnetic field, the space between the lines are reg...

Magnetic field lines are perfectly real. They occur in many situations such as the aurora, and the good old iron-filings experiment. Look at solar flares, and SOHO images of the sun's corona -you see the looped field lines. Spacecraft can determine the lines' positions by monitoring the density of c...