Booberfish.com

Archive for September 19th, 2006

What I learned in school today

Newton's third law can be violated.

As it turns out, since magnetic force is related to the cross product of a charged particle’s velocity and the magnetic field vector, Newton’s third law, that ever action has an equal and opposite reaction, is not true in general. This can be seen in the situation shown where two positively charge particles move towards each other with an angle between them of 90 degrees, such as along the x and y axis towards the origin.