Many grade school students perform a simple physics experiment by using iron fillings to outline a magnetic field. Seizing on their inner-child, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum ...

When you demonstrate the magnetic field of a bar magnet using iron filings, the filings form lines. But isn’t the field a continuous plane? What makes the lines form and why do they spread apart at ...

Iron filings dropped on a sheet of paper and given a good shake move about haphazardly without settling into any particular arrangement. If this process is repeated with a bar magnet placed underneath ...