Motivated by an observation of a popular children’s toy, I investigate the behavior of a bar magnet with a steel ball bearing held on one of its poles as it approaches another bar magnet. Mapping the problem onto electrostatics, I give an explanation of my observations based on the behavior of point charges near an isolated, uncharged sphere. This magnetic analog offers a simple demonstration of the familiar “method of images” in electrostatics.
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Wilson C. K. Poon (2003) studied this question.
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