
Why Do Magnetic Fields Form Loops Instead of Radiating Like Electric Fields?
Today I was thinking about Earth’s magnetic field and noticed something that confused me at first.
Electric field lines radiate outward from positive charge, so intuitively I expected magnetic fields to behave similarly. But magnetic field lines instead form closed loops, entering one pole and leaving the other.
Is the reason fundamentally tied to the fact that isolated magnetic monopoles haven’t been observed? If magnetic monopoles did exist, would magnetic field geometry resemble electric fields much more closely?