This Week’s Science News from SWTG

Magnetic Monopoles & AI-Powered Quantum Computing

Magnetic Monopoles Might Actually Exist, Researchers Find

Particle physicists have invented a lot of particles that no one has ever seen. But there is one that’s special: the magnetic monopole. Magnets always have two poles. If you break them apart, you just have two smaller magnets, each with two poles. This is because fundamentally, there is no such thing as just one magnetic pole.

A magnetic monopole now would be a particle that has just one of these magnetic poles, either North or South, just like we have particles with positive and negative electric charges. Magnetic monopoles could solve a lot of problems, but so far physicists thought that if they existed, they’d cause a paradox — they would break up indivisible particles. Now, however, they think they’ve finally found an explanation for the paradox, and magnetic monopoles have never looked better.

Magnetic monopoles were first introduced by Paul Dirac in 1931, who wrote that theoretical physicists should “employ all the resources of pure mathematics in attempts to perfect and generalise the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics.” In this case, the imperfection that he wanted to remove is that Maxwell’s equations for electrodynamics are not as beautiful as they could be.

I can totally understand why Dirac thought that this must be true, and so did many physicists at the time. They were not much bothered by the fact that no one had ever seen a magnetic monopole. They thought that, well, maybe they’re very rare, or difficult to produce.

So, after they had completed the standard model in the 1970s, they built experiments to look for magnetic monopoles. They even found a few. One detection was reported in 1975. Another one in 1982 and yet another one in 1985. These detections were never confirmed, but you know how particle physicists are, they said they just need better detectors.

The lack of evidence didn’t dampen their enthusiasm, but a theoretical problem did. It’s that calculations showed that magnetic monopoles would lead to a very odd paradox. Their existence seemed to make particles break apart.