Thursday, June 30, 2005

Oersted

Unit of magnetic-field strength, in the centimetre-gram-second system of physical units. Named for the 19th-century Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, it is defined as the intensity of a magnetic field in a vacuum in which a unit magnetic pole (one that repels a similar pole at a distance of one centimetre with a force of one dyne) experiences a mechanical force of