Spinning a Magnet About its Axis
Most recent answer: 03/24/2014
- Alec (age 30)
Lewiston, Maine, USA
This is a thought-provoking set of questions.
Let me answer the 2nd one first. All the local electromagnetic effects are fully described by the local electromagnetic field. So unfortunately there's no clever way of moving around local conductors etc. to find out something more about the sources of that field.
That means that your first question boils down to whether spinning that magnet about its axis changes its field in some way. In particular, we're interested in whether it makes a radial electric field and thus changes the electrical effects on the rotating conductor. The spinning doesn't break the cylindrical symmetry of the problem. So any radial field would be outwards everywhere or inwards everywhere. That would require that the magnet not be electrically neutral- but it is.
So it looks like spinning that magnet about its axis won't affect the potential on the conductor. (We're ignoring general relativistic effects such as frame-dragging, which would all be very weak.)
Mike W.
(published on 03/24/2014)