Compasses are very inaccurate due to the earths massive tilt
You are not really going north
You’re going more NW
The compass that points N is actually pointing to the South Pole?? You’re going N but the pole is misnamed
They need to rename the Poles to match the compass
It's much more complex than that.
Yes, you're right about the Earth's magnetic north pole really being the south pole, in the strict sense of how poles are defined on magnets. Magnets were defined by which direction which pole tends to point, and since opposite poles attract, the Earth's magnetic north pole, which attracts the north pole of a magnet, is really the south pole.
Scientific nomenclature is littered with such odd little inconsistencies,based on more primitive abilities to make sense of what could be observed. In his experiments with electricity, Benjamin Franklin spent some time observing arcs, trying to determine which way they jumped. Once he thought he had as good a guess as he could make, he defined the positive pole as that from which he thought electricity was coming, and negative as where he thought it was going. To this day, much work is done using the “conventional flow” assumption, that electricity flows from positive to negative, though now we know that it is electrons that are actually moving, and in the opposite of that direction. Electrons, of course, have a
“negative” charge, only because
“Positive” and
“Negative” were defined well before we knew what we were actually defining.
Anyway, back to the Earth and its magnetic field, and how it relates to a compass and a dip needle. It's much more complex than what most people assume, that no matter where you are on Earth, that the compass' needle will point straight toward the magnetic poles. As this map shows, the magnetic field does not run along straight lines, and this is only showing it in two dimensions. You wouldn't be able to tell from this map, but where I am in Sacramento, California, the magnetic field is actually running close to vertical. magnetic north is more or less northish, but much closer to straight down than to north.
