Re: Is a spherical magnet with the south pole in the center possible?

Dear Mark!

What you want to construct is a thing that physicists have been looking for in vain during the last 70 years: a magnetic monopole. This topic (and actually the very same question you have posed) has been discussed before in he MSN: 899932743.Ph discusses your thought experiment, whereas 855899209.Ph has some more theoretical insights.

As far as we know today, magnetic fields are produced by currents or changing electric fields. Neither possibility involves magnetic monopoles, though. In your experiment, the magnetic field outside the sphere is zero because the field from the `inside poles' exactly cancels the field from the outside ones. This does not change even if you go straight into the material, because if you break a permanent dipole magnet in two (perpendicular to its axis), you get two new dipoles.

Magnetic monopoles might play a role in the physics that describes the properties of quarks, the fundamental constituents of nucleons. But that is far from proven and much work is being done in this field right now.

Hope that helps,
Georg.