When I was at university studying maths and physics (approximately in the Bronze Age) we were told that magnetic monopoles were a theoretical possibility but that no-one has ever found one. Magnets have two poles, conventionally called North and South, and as you’ll remember the N and S are attracted to each other. A monopole would be an isolated north or south pole, a bit as though you’d broken a bar magnet in half and, instead of two smaller bar magnets, you wound up with a north one and a south one.
Now, scientists have made some. Sure, the monopoles are tiny and the environment they have been constructed in is staggeringly far from what we could consider normal, but the fact remains: physicists have now made what we have been looking for. The equations were right!
Someone’s going to ask what good they are. Let’s leave finding a use for them to others. I’m just happy that something scientists so long predicted has finally come to pass.
