Electrons deflected by magnetic field

The Forces of Nature by Kelland Terry, Ph.D.

My wife purchased the Robo-Pong as a gift for me. She knew that I had a strong love of the game that began in my childhood. When I was a child our small dining room table also served as a Ping-Pong table. It was too short but it didn’t matter. It was there I learned how top spin could be used to keep the ball from flying off the end of the table, and under spin would often cause my opponent to hit the ball into the net. It was these observations that gave me the idea to test the curvature of a ball in a magnetic field. I was almost dumbfounded, however, when I found that a spinning table tennis ball curves more in a magnetic field. The field must have physical properties. It must have mass.

Spinning Ping-Pong balls in flight are not the only particles that are deflected in a magnetic field. Physicists have shown that a stream of electrons traveling between the north pole and south pole of a magnet are deflected. When the electrons strike the elastic string barrier created by magnetic field, it causes the spinning electrons to move more or less at right angles to their movement through the wire. They literally push the wire up as they bang against the atoms in their path, and this movement is used in an electric motor to cause a rod to spin. Viola, you have converted electric energy to mechanical energy. Notice, the magnet only provides a barrier to the onrushing electrons; it serves no other purpose to the motor.