Record-Setting 100+ T Magnetic Field Achieved At Los Alamos 166
New submitter schrodingersGato writes "Researchers at the Los Alamos campus of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory achieved a record-setting 100.75 Tesla magnetic field. To do this, scientists placed a resistive magnet (a sophisticated electromagnet) coupled to massive bank of capacitors within another magnet fixed at a 'lower' magnetic field. A short-lived pulse two million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field was generated. The magnet itself made an eerie sound as it was energized (video). Prepare for the birth of Magneto!"
Interplanetary Space? (Score:3, Interesting)
If 100 tesla is achievable now, then I can imagine it wouldn't take long before a field can be generated which would be powerful enough to provide a buffer against most ionizing radiation a la Earth's own magnetic field, but I could be way in the realm of science fiction with this thought.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:5, Interesting)
The earths magnetic field is not strong, it's just huge. You're probably more burdned by power and weight and size contraints if you want to shield a shuttle than field strenght.
What I find interesting with this is that some "magic physics" theories postulates funny things to be possible at some ~50 tesla strenght. Probably won't show up anything, but testing them to falsify is always a noble goal.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:4, Informative)
What I find interesting with this is that some "magic physics" theories postulates funny things to be possible at some ~50 tesla strenght. Probably won't show up anything, but testing them to falsify is always a noble goal.
They went to pulsed 200T in 1950-ies [wikipedia.org] (see the MK2 in 1956).
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Yes, but only with destructive pulsing and you can probably agree that there's a bit of problems with running tests where the magnet pulse is accompanied by a HE shockwave.
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theories that some "magic physics" theories postulates funny things to be possible at some ~50 tesla strenght
They went to pulsed 200T in 1950-ies [wikipedia.org] (see the MK2 in 1956).
Yes, but only with destructive pulsing and you can probably agree that there's a bit of problems with running tests where the magnet pulse is accompanied by a HE shockwave.
I was answering to the "funny things happen over ~50T", not diminishing the merit of the non-destructive 100+T.
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How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds and other non-EM ionizing radiation in interplanetary space?
A hypothetical ship is the easiest kind to protect from all sorts of dangers; the size doesn't even matter!
Or were you asking, hypothetically, what the field strength needed to protect a space-shuttle size ship would be?
(Pedants hide their ignorance and inability to answer the question by making fun of the grammar of the parent)
Not just field strength (Score:4, Interesting)
How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds
The deflection of charged particles in a magnetic field is roughly proportional to the strength of the field and the "thickness" of the field i.e. the distance that the charged particle travels through it. So (ignoring important complexities like varying field strength, ship geomtery etc.) a 100T field 1 m around the craft would be roughly as effective as a 1T field extending 100m around the craft.
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Re:Not just field strength (Score:5, Informative)
You're damn right 100T is incredibly powerful. Most MRI rings for humans max out at 3T. Some of the experimental medical rings are 7T-8T and you have to be really careful working around those. I can't imagine 100T. Hell, we stuck a dumpster to a brick wall with a 5T magnet.
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Small animals MRI machines go up to 17T.
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There a comment lower down that talks about a human rated magnet in the teens. It's been a while since I was in diagnostic imaging, and the 8T magnets at the time had tiny bore holes, and were limited to small animal use.
Jeez, 17T, that must have amazing resolution. Any idea how many slices?
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I remember an NMR spectrometer from when I was in college that had a 4T field. Keep your credit cards and mechanical watches away!
17T or 100T is wacky strong.
Re:Not just field strength (Score:4, Informative)
14 years ago I routinely used a 12T NMR, and we had a 17T model in the basement (time on that one was a bit harder to get).
However, to be useful for most forms of NMR the field has to be very uniform and stable over long periods of time. You can't do that with pulses or some of the other techniques used at this high-field lab. There are of course all kinds of other things you can do there.
MRIs tend to be much weaker than NMRs. The problem is the bore size of the magnet. Scaling up the size of a magnet is very difficult, and it takes a lot more energy to make a weak field the size of the earth than a strong one that you can fit a skinny test tube inside. This is similar to the difference between temperature and heat. A match and a bonfire might be the same temperature, but the bonfire puts out way more heat.
Medical MRI tends to be only a few T at most. Really big ones are in the very low teens, and are VERY expensive to build. Of course, MRIs have spacial resolution and NMRs typically do not. An NMR probes fairly complex chemical relationships but does not generate a spacial image. An MRI probes fairly simple chemical relationships (often just the presence of water or a contrast agent), but it takes a 3D picture.
The other more modern trend is building bigger NMRs but instead of making them more powerful using extra magnets to cancel out the field outside of the dewer. This makes them easier to site - and people don't get injured by flying tools if somebody is careless. High-field NMRs can be very dangerous when performing operations like filling with the aid of gas cylinders (with very long hoses). Shielding or not, another big danger with either NMRs or MRIs is ventilation. If something causes the magnet to quench you can get huge volumes of He/N2 liberation which will quickly displace all O2 in even a large room.
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Your comment confuses me greatly. NMR was the original name of MRI, they dropped the N because no one likes the word nuclear...
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Typically the term MRI is applied to medical use, and NMR to non-medical use.
Also, MRI is generally used for imaging, and NMR usually is not associated with generating images (at least not images where a pixel on the image corresponds to some point in space inside the magnet).
Most MRI images ask the question "is there water in this spot or not?" Most NMR data visualizations represent whether there are certain relationships between particular atoms in some molecule. For example, an NMR might ask the questi
I don't think you mean 17T! (Score:2)
Small animals MRI machines go up to 17T.
Are you sure about that? At that field strength you have a sufficiently large diamagnetic effect to levitate small animals like a frog [youtube.com]. A quick search on Google suggests that 7T might be the number you are looking for.
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Nope, 17T for tissue samples and small animals is correct for a very small bore size (coils available between 1 and 10mm) these are usually NMR though. Resolution is dependent on your coil and what you're trying to do but can be anywhere between 0.05-0.2mm
7T is commercially available for human research which gives a resolution of .1mm. I think 3T for clinical is about the standard for new installations in the better hospitals, 1.5T for cheap, mobile or open (half) systems. You can get a small .5T for a litt
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My understanding is that many MRIs are around 1 T.
For an example of how complicated it is, rare earth magnets are about 1 tesla too (just much smaller field)
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Now have a guess what my reaction was when our astrophysics lecturer started talking about gigatesla field strengths. Granted, neutron stars have a few other impressive features, such as a spoonful of their surface material having a mass that exceeds that of the pyramids, but the mere mention of gigatesla field strengths was enough to drop my jaw.
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I'm curious what the field strength near a micro blackhole would be like. Would a micro-blackhole be able to significantly slow its fall in Earth's magnetic field?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#Black_hole_hypothesis [wikipedia.org]
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1T is the magnetic field strength of Earth, no?
Nope. That's off by a few orders of magnitude. The magnetic field of the Earth is about 30e-6 to 60e-6 T at the surface, depending on where you measure it at. The key is the Earth's magnetic field is extremely large in human terms, since it's large enough to easily fill multiple Earth radii.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's great that you can quote a few numbers you recall being important and draw inferences from them, but please leave the science to people who didn't just read the summary of an article, and go "hey that number I just read is bigger than another one I remember reading about somewhere else, so I'm close to discovering a solution!"
This is like if you find out that if you place a 50lb bag on a 100 foot lever, you can generate 5000ft-lb of torque, and holy crap how far away are we from sandbag-lever arm car engines!?
First off:
This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks. The banks themselves probably took a few minutes to charge up, at a power draw unsustainable for any space vehicle, and discharged a "short lived" pulse, which from the video, was order of seconds. Regardless, the point of mentioning "short-lived" is obviously that this cannot run in steady state, which wouldn't do much for protection.
Second (and you and whoever modded you up have probably heard of this exciting term too):
The physics behind an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) is exactly what this magnet would create: a large magnetic flux change through closed conducting circuits. That means that if you can't generate this type of magnetic field in steady state (remember the words "short-lived"?), you'd end up frying more components than whatever charged particles you want to protect against.
Third:
Does anyone know how standard magnetic fields are generated, or at least bother to take a look at the pretty pictures in the article? The 100T that was quoted was undoubtedly in the center of the giant metal solenoid (new buzzword for the pseudoscientists out there!). To "protect" a space vehicle from more science words using this specific methodology basically means building a giant metal sewer pipe around every space shuttle to begin with. The technology required to be useful in stellar flight requires small modular field generators that can create magnetic fields external to itself (and anything it wants to protect), not internal (where once again dFlux/dt would fry your circuits).
Finally:
"Non-EM ionizing radiation" is a cute and exciting phrase, but really that just means other "ions". And yes, if a magnetic field can stop a proton (a hydrogen ion) from that "non-EM" solar wind, it'll stop other forms of ions as well, as they all follow the same physics of being a massive (i.e. having mass) charged particle.
+3 interesting?? What the fuck, mods.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:5, Funny)
+ 5 Informative, -6 for being a snarky asshole.
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I think you got the sign on the second mod wrong.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ref: http://cculc.ccu.edu.tw/pdf/paper.pdf [ccu.edu.tw]
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And it's that wonderful 99% that ends up repeating a mis-understanding of said information in subsequent articles until we end up with every thread looking like those nuclear powerplant ones where most likely humanities majors have already set their religion on either thorium or pebble or TW reactors with no understanding of the physics nor the real-world nuclear proliferation implications.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks.
If you're going to pour on the snark, you could at least read enough of the article to understand that, while a capacitor bank is used in establishing the magnetic field, the primary energy storage was from a motor-generator that stores 1.2 GJ of energy for the experiments. So, while I agree that it's frustrating to hear half baked ideas for applications of exciting new science to pet science fiction dreams, doing so in a confrontational manner does little to actually enhance the knowledge of the folks making those sorts of suggestions.
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point.
But the snark is there for a reason. He posed a silly thought, and was instantly modded to +3 with worthless comments otherwise. I post something factual with a shit attitude, and everyone spends additional effort trying their best to prove me wrong. Which one got the general public to do more thinking? Even the other (non AC) response to mine tried to at least mention some high school physics and bring up regimes where my EMP example might not completely hold.
The real problem isn't that comments are misleading, but that too many people blindly eat up whatever sounds important or right without doing their own due diligence, as OP demonstrated first hand.
There was a link on ./ a week ago regarding online comment sections being completely worthless. It was almost ironic that it was posted in ./, probably best known for its comments sections, and I refuse to let the same thing happen here without a fight.
Ming
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Obligatory.
You're obviously new here.
/. comments are famous for being completely worthless. Or you just don't read enough of them. That's why there's a rating system. So you can easily see the really worthless ones, and ignore the worthwhile ones.
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Also, if he hadn't been so snarky and actually had any creativity, he might have found some engineering that could be done on the apparatus to make it steady state. I haven't read the article, and not sure I'd want to be inside a space vehicle generating a 100T magnetic steady state or not.
A little engineering knowledge might have helped him see beyond his theoretical physics knowledge, which itself is lacking, as has been pointed out.
The fact the field is transient doesn't mean it needs to be that way.
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This is a transient field generated by an electric current that was created through the discharge of capacitor banks.
If you're going to pour on the snark, you could at least read enough of the article to understand that, while a capacitor bank is used in establishing the magnetic field, the primary energy storage was from a motor-generator that stores 1.2 GJ of energy for the experiments. So, while I agree that it's frustrating to hear half baked ideas for applications of exciting new science to pet science fiction dreams, doing so in a confrontational manner does little to actually enhance the knowledge of the folks making those sorts of suggestions.
...but it does enhance the entertainment value of the thread for those of us who don't expect, let alone *require*, that every slashdot post have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Frankly, I *love* browsing at -1. People are too funny, really...
Re:Interplanetary Space? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone know how standard magnetic fields are generated, or at least bother to take a look at the pretty pictures in the article? The 100T that was quoted was undoubtedly in the center of the giant metal solenoid (new buzzword for the pseudoscientists out there!). To "protect" a space vehicle from more science words using this specific methodology basically means building a giant metal sewer pipe around every space shuttle to begin with.
This in itself shows a clear lack of understanding of how magnetic fields work. Magnetic fields are closed loops: what that means is, if there is a 100T flux through the middle of the magnet, there will also be an intense magnetic field curving back around the outside of the magnet (this is middle-school physics here). So if you ran the magnet through the center of the ship (and had sufficient power to leave it on, or hell a permanent magnet would also work), it would create a magnetic field that would extend around the entirety of the ship, which would deflect and charged particles stream that got near the ship (except at the ends, where like the Earth's north pole, the field would be parallel to incoming particles and wouldn't be deflected). Indeed, that design would be exactly identical to the Earth's magnetic field.
Also, the EMP effect would be non-existent if you could keep the magnet charged (assuming you built up slowly), so that point is... well, not relevant to the posters question (he didn't say this design would work, only asked how strong the field would need to be in general). And your third point is just being snarky. He asked an interesting hypothetical question, and you answered snarkily and, ironically, in a way that revealed your own ignorance.
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And it's pretty clear that high school physics was where your understanding ended.
Re: closed loops
Grab a plasma physics text (which is highly applicable in the regime of astrphysical charged particles) and learn about the conservation of magnetic moment. This was the basis for Z-pinch style devices attempting fusion towards the end of the cold war, and it's also the basis for why charged particles stuck in the earth's magnetic field DON'T just completely fry the northern and southern poles, but rather boun
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Actually, I'm fairly sure you're wrong here. Please explain how these particles are bouncing "back and forth" "inside" a N-S permanent magnet. Sounds like a perpetual motion machine to me and I call BS. Not to mention the fact we have observed a charged particle emission from the poles in black holes. If charged particles continually entered the Earth and get stuck bouncing back and forth the Earth would gain mass, conservation of energy would be violated, and over 4.3 billion years or so, that would be sig
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Um, Tokamak? As in 1950s modern?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak [wikipedia.org]
Experimental research of tokamak systems started in 1956 in Kurchatov Institute, Moscow by a group of Soviet scientists led by Lev Artsimovich. The group constructed the first tokamaks, the most successful being T-3 and its larger version T-4. T-4 was tested in 1968 in Novosibirsk, conducting the first ever quasistationary thermonuclear fusion reaction.
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Why be a douche about it? For one thing, you didn't even address the question. He did not ask: "Wow, this is neato! How can we apply this methodology to protecting starships?!!" He was asking about the use of magnetism in general to protect spacecraft from radiation. This is by no means a silly question [bbc.co.uk] or one steeped in ignorance. Instead, you went on a long tangent about the unsuitability of transient magnet fields and EM pulses -- relevant to the article but irrelevant to the question. I didn't e
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100 Tesla is possiblenow as a pulse. A stable 100T is much harder. One big enough to shield a space ship is much harder than that.
Also, it might not be possible to live in such a strong field. It certainly wouldn't be comfortable.
What would survive. (Score:2)
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Re:What would survive. (Score:4, Informative)
The strongest MRI currently used on humans is 9.1T and a 13T MRI scanner is being built - might already be finished. Given that the 9.1T is good enough to see individual neurons, the 13T scanner might be good enough to start seeing the fine structure of the synapses. I look forward to seeing the photos that will hopefully be published once the scanner gets going.
It would be interesting to see how far you could go before the damage becomes excessive. Would it be possible to build an MRI capable of directly observing the proteins that control and form memories? Could you observe the tau protein unpeeling as Alzheimer's begins? (Long before structural changes occur, which in turn is long before symptoms appear.)
How about archaeological uses? Could a high-power MRI reveal something of the mental state of the various bog bodies that have been found? What about Otzi? If we can directly observe memory structure, could we interrogate his brain to find out what happened to him?
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Frogs and other small, light items levitated at 16T if I remember correctly and humans would probably not levitate because of their mass (gravity still works). I doubt 16T systems have already been approved for human research but either way the side effects would probably be going more towards nausea and dizziness. I don't know enough about how the brain works but it would definitely be interesting to see at what point we can influence the brain itself.
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Technically, the FDA has already stated that 7.3T MRI is approved for clinical use, so any hold-ups between the 3T and 7.3T range is arguably in violation of their own approval process. Further, scanners for medical research using live patients do not need FDA approval and can go at high as they like, which is why there are 3-4 9.1T scanners already in use. Patients with actual clinical need can also gain access to non-approved systems, subject to all manner of waivers and disclaimers.
Improving sensitivity
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Molecules absorb at very specific frequencies, so provided you don't emit microwave radiation at the hydroxide bond frequency or any other frequencies "reserved" by biochemistry, you should be safe enough. That means that you need to be very selective about microwave frequency components, which in turn means specific sized magnets won't be usable at all. Those not in the automatically excluded list will depend on how good you are at ensuring genuinely harmful frequencies either don't occur or don't reach th
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Not all MRI is NMR. MRI can be purely magnetic using supercooled conductors and lots of power. These are the ones used on humans.
NMR are usually the higher powered siblings of MRI systems with usually very small bores and really, really strong fields (up to 21T) usually used in spectroscopy.
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Who's building the 13T? When I got out of diagnostic imaging, 8T was as big as we got, and those things were monsters but the bore hole was only large enough for the leg of a small dog.
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I may have missed something but the 16T MRI appears to have only been used on rodents, but where they got hold of enough bankers to develop it, I don't know.
Re:What would survive. (Score:4, Informative)
My bad, it's 11T. See links below for info.
This is the existing 9T MRI with 80cm bore.
http://medgadget.com/2007/12/94_tesla_monster_mri.html [medgadget.com]
This is the whole-body 11T MRI being built
http://irfu.cea.fr/en/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/ast_visu.php?id_ast=3058 [irfu.cea.fr]
Some of the underlying technology:
http://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/print/2551 [microwavejournal.com]
http://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/10402-software-platform-for-mri-phased-array-system-design-optimization [microwavejournal.com]
http://www.hfmmagazine.com/hfmmagazine_app/jsp/articledisplay.jsp?dcrpath=AHA/PubsNewsArticleGen/data/0403HFM_NEWS_Construction [hfmmagazine.com]
http://www.aapm.org/meetings/05am/pdf/18-2826-94182-387.pdf [aapm.org]
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Besides spacial resolution, higher field MRI would allow more chemical information to be probed. At sufficient field strengths it becomes more practical to image nuclei other than hydrogen. You can also study stuff like diffusion and movement of blood/etc. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance has many applications beyond the fairly simple pictures generated by most MRI machines, but the biggest limitation has been the field sizes of magnets large enough to stuff a person into.
Imaging other nuclei than hydrogen wou
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Frankly, old-timers in any field tend to be horribly conservative. In archaeology, techniques like thermofluorescence, atomic mass spectrometry, etc, are 15+ years old but are only now starting to be used -- and almost exclusively by younger generations with more flexible minds. I've been privileged to see techniques being introduced into fields like inorganic biochemistry by the brute-force of innovative thinking by people unsatisfied by existing methods.
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Tend to agree here. I think another issue is likely to be insurance payments. A new pulse sequence might as well be a new class of drug as far as getting paid for it goes. That's another group of people who don't understand NMR theory to try to explain what you're doing to.
The high fields are another big issue. MRIs must be big money since they're popping up all over the place, but I imagine that much of that money comes from (possibly unnecessary) shoulder pain images and such. Maybe a stroke victim m
In unrelated news... (Score:2, Funny)
>> A short-lived pulse two million times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field was generated.
In unrelated news, government researchers have issued an RFP for 100 new disk drives and data recovery services.
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Dammit, I thought I told the HARP project guys to spin down during that period!
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and ten female researchers, with copper clad IUDs, celebrated by smoking...from their vaginas
EAT IT, Thomas! (Score:5, Funny)
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It's really Gauss who is Tesla's bitch...
I love that the record is 100 Tesla. No scaling prefixes necessary.
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You mean 1 hectoTesla, or 0.1 kiloTesla?
Re:EAT IT, Thomas! (Score:5, Funny)
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Would the Edison use Imperial or Metric units?
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Only when the trolling C&Ds are carried by an unladen swallow.
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Sadly, there is an award named after Edison and he gets all the attention in schoolbooks. Seems Edison's slow, amateur progress from a telegraph addict to inventing one of the least efficient light sources known to man is preferable to teaching about the 'madman' who repeatedly did the 'impossible' and established the technological foundation for the majority of modern age.
Probably just a bunch of teachers scared about what the middle-school science fairs would look like if Tesla had been part of the lesso
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Sadly, there is an award named after Edison and he gets all the attention in schoolbooks. Seems Edison's slow, amateur progress from a telegraph addict to inventing one of the least efficient light sources known to man is preferable to teaching about the 'madman' who repeatedly did the 'impossible' and established the technological foundation for the majority of modern age.
Probably just a bunch of teachers scared about what the middle-school science fairs would look like if Tesla had been part of the lesson plan...
Dude did invent quite a few things. He *does* deserve mention as a great inventor. You're right that Tesla is under-appreciated but that's no reason to beat down Edison.
I thought I felt (Score:2)
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...and I had a hard-drive failure. Damn you, Los Alamos!
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That wasn't change.
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Many years ago I had a summer job at the TRIUMF cyclotron. When you stood above the main magnet (on top of a thick layer of concrete shielding blocks) the field was strong enough that you could hold one coin vertically and stick another one onto its bottom edge.
The stray field was too weak to affect credit cards or hard drives, but it did do interesting things to the CRT monitors in nearby offices.
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Did anyone else note in the video the apparent movement of that dangling cable/belt, right around the time the sound hit its apex?
Actually, yes I did. If the movement was due to it being affected by the magnetic field, then I doubt the object's placement there was an accident- I assume they would have had to account for *anything* remotely magnetic in the vicinity(!)
Did they send a poet? (Score:1)
What insights will we gain from this? (Score:3)
What insights will we gain from this breakthrough? As it stands it sounds as impressive as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Cool, but sort of useless.
Why did they choose 100 Tesla as a target? Why not 117 Tesla? That is even more!
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It doesn't go to 111 :(
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From TFA:
"Today’s 100.75-tesla performance produced research results for scientific teams from Rutgers University, ÉcoleNationaleSupérieure d’Ingénieurs deCaen (ENSICAEN), McMaster University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Minnesota, Cambridge University, University of British Columbia, and Oxford University. The science that we expect to come out varies with the experiment, but can be summarized as:
Quantum Phase transitions and new ultra high field magnetic states
Elect
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Commercialized? It would be great if that was obvious. I'm trying to figure out what you can DO with 100T.
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Oh, there's a good chance there ARE uses for this, and in a surprising way.
The energy levels in electrons of atoms are perturbed by magnetic fields. So, in addition to temperature, and pressure,
a magnetic field can change chemical energies (and cause or inhibit reactions, change reaction rates...).
Douglas Hofstadter did some work (theoretical) on high magnetic fields, before writing _Goedel, Escher, Bach_.
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Why did they choose 100 Tesla as a target? Why not 117 Tesla? That is even more!
1.17 Holy Grails [youtube.com]? That's crazy talk!
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The number is rather numeric. ABC is rather symbolic, wouldn't you say? :)
So a bunch of "boffins" (yes I read The Register sometimes) created a magnetic field which, measured in some completely arbitrary units of flux density, precisely achieved a figure which is the square of the number of digits endowing the two human upper appendages.
Peep science (Score:1)
Yes, but what will it do to a marshmallow peep?
Imagine (Score:2)
natural fields 10^10 times stronger (Score:2)
This is a record for an artificial field. The strongest naturally occurring fields are believed to be about 10^12 Tesla for some pulsars.
They're too late with this stunt. (Score:2)
If the neighborhood still watched tube TV's, you could distort or completely blank everyone's picture within an X mile radius.
Strong Magnets! (but only transient) (Score:2)
I used to work next to the french Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses [grenoble.cnrs.fr] (Powerful Magnetic Field National Laboratory) and was lucky enough to visit it once during the yearly Science Day (why don't we have this in the US?).
They claimed they had the second most powerful magnets in the world, IIRC behind the Fermilab, at about 32T (again, IIRC). Note that this is a sustained magnetic field, not transient as the OP's record. (still, hitting 100T without destroying the magnet is one hell of a
Test for Heim theory (Score:2)
IIRC, Heim theory [wikipedia.org] proposes a type of antigravity effect based on magnetic interactions.
The effect is difficult to test on Earth, because the effect is smaller the closer you get to a gravitational body. I seem to recall an experiment on Earth would require something like 14T to produce a measurable effect.
Maybe we could set up the Heim propulsion using this system and definitively decide whether Heim was correct?
Ah - here [hpcc-space.de] is the link. The paper tosses out values of 25T and 60T as needed to do interesting th
I feel a disturbance in the Force ... (Score:2)
Ehrm.... (Score:2)
Lobster (Score:2)
Bonus action (Score:2)
Researchers celebrated by having their fillings restored after a painful emergency.
In other news, superhero Dr. Magnet explained to the press that the large bulge in his trunks was merely because he'd flown too close to Los Alamos. His sidekick Alnico Girl shook her head and said "Don't believe a word that horny bastard says."
That's nothing... (Score:2)
Wait until Livermore powers up the bobble generator they're building in secret.
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Actually, for all you physicists out there and just for goggles, what kind of power and size of device would you need to give a spacecraft a magnetic field strong to protect that craft from radiation in the same manner the earth's magnetic field protects us?
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Hey we are talking about fictional technology so lets use fictional units of measurements.
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Los Alamos can't say. For some reason all of the hard drives storing the data were wiped.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I thought it sounded like the probe from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.