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What is the difference between Ampere's circuital law and Oersted's law?

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Should they be merged? --ChetvornoTALK 22:30, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I realize this question is over 3 years old now, but I was wondering the same thing. As I understand it, what Oersted described really only applies to a straight conductor carrying a steady current, so I would think the name "Oersted's Law" would be better applied to B=μ0I/2πr. I have never heard the vector equation presented here referred to as "Oersted's Law", only "Ampere's Law" or similar. I don't know that a merge would be appropriate, but I believe a rewrite is certainly in order. 131.151.77.90 (talk) 19:32, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a Ph.D. physicist, and I have also only heard this called "Ampere's law", never "Oersted's law." Yet there's not even any mention of this being called Ampere's law. Something is amiss here. This is one reason I tell my students not to rely on Wikipedia. SimpsonDG (talk) 20:58, 31 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The Becker and Dhogal sources clearly show the term was used historically and has some usage today; here are some more sources: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. You have to remember that scientific terminology changes. Oersted discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism and for 70 years, from 1820 until Heaviside's 1884 reformulation of Maxwell's equations in modern form made physicists aware of the displacement current term, the source law for the magnetic field had the form Oersted deduced, so it was called Oersted's law. And the article does mention Ampere's law, see the last paragraph which explains the difference. However I appreciate the feedback and I agree the article should probably mention that the term is mainly replaced by Ampere's law. --ChetvornoTALK 07:19, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Difference

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Both laws are useless 😆😆 117.249.230.174 (talk) 01:28, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Minus sign

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The magnetic field (marked B, indicated by red field lines) around wire carrying an electric current (marked I).

In this picture, someone used a hyphen instead of a minus sign. The minus sign should look just like the plus sign but without the vertical part. Thus:

One of the great deficiencies of Wikipedia is that we cannot copy-edit things like this. Michael Hardy (talk) 18:17, 28 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

 Done. Anyone can edit Commons images, and this one was SVG so it was easy-peasy to change using a free SVG editor like Inkscape. --ChetvornoTALK 00:32, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]