I know that opposite poles attract and similar poles repell but if you had a small magnet that didn’t have it’s poles labeled, how would you figure out which side is negative and which is positive?
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If you have an electron gun (such as an old cathode ray tube), you can examine which way the beam is deflected by the magnet’s field and use that to determine the poles of the magnet. If the beam is pointed to your left, and the north pole of the magnet is placed close to it pointing away from you, the beam will be deflected downward. The south pole will deflect it upward.
This method is interesting because it does not require you to know anything about which way is north (or even be near a planet with a magnetic field at all).
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