The Strange Reason No One Has Ever Found a Magnetic Monopole

Hey guys! We’re now live on Spotify🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/3qYsIDs... On a Sunday afternoon in 1982, in an empty Stanford basement, a loop of frozen wire jumped by exactly the amount a magnet with only one end would cause. Then it went flat, and in forty-four years of searching, under mountains and in Antarctic ice, nothing has moved it again. If theory insists these particles exist, where are they? A slow walk from a medieval letter on magnets to Dirac's invisible string and a universe that should have drowned in monopoles, toward a question that turns out to be about you. Get comfortable and let this slow hunt for the missing monopole keep you company tonight. Subscribe to Lights Out Physics if you enjoy the long way around the universe. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 1:27 The Sunday signal at Stanford 10:53 A magnet always has two ends 19:38 Maxwell's broken mirror 29:48 Dirac's invisible string 41:13 The hedgehog in the vacuum 51:53 A universe that should be full of them 1:01:47 The balloon and the Moon rocks 1:10:59 Exactly eight 1:21:36 A spectacular realization 1:31:33 Weighing the silence 1:42:06 The strongest magnets in the universe 1:51:45 Monopoles that aren't 1:59:21 The strange reason 2:09:56 Still listening SOURCES First results from a superconductive detector for moving magnetic monopoles (Cabrera, 1982) — https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19820... Quantised Singularities in the Electromagnetic Field (Dirac, 1931) — https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/193... Introduction to Magnetic Monopoles (Rajantie) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.3077 Observation of an unexplained event from a magnetic monopole detector (Nature, 1986) — https://www.nature.com/articles/321402a0 Monopoleon (Kragh, Simply Dirac) — https://pressbooks.pub/simplydirac/ch... The growth of inflation (symmetry magazine) — https://symmetrymagazine.org/article/... Search for Relativistic Magnetic Monopoles with Eight Years of IceCube Data — https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13719 Searching for Magnetic Monopoles with the Earth's Magnetic Field — https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.06286 Search for magnetic monopoles produced via the Schwinger mechanism (Nature, 2022) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... MoEDAL zeroes in on magnetic monopoles (CERN) — https://home.cern/news/news/physics/m... LHC beam pipe brings monopole search closer than ever (University of Nottingham) — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases... ATLAS search for magnetic monopoles in 13 TeV collisions — https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04835 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... — Disclaimer: Lights Out Physics is an education and relaxation channel. Factual material is based on peer-reviewed research and official scientific bodies; any speculation, fringe theory, or personal analysis is identified as such when it appears. This is not a news channel. Viewer discretion advised. #MagneticMonopole #DiracMonopole