I was reading about the world's biggest magnet. Its humungous and weighs many hundreds of tonnes. Once in position in France it will assist in the proposed production of fusion energy at ITER, which has proved nigh on impossible to make effectively anywhere up to press.
What amazed me was the magnetic power of the magnet. It will produce a magnetic field 280 times larger than our own Earth!
Its the stuff of 1950's B-Movies and I can't help feeling a little terrified by such massive science just like I did when I saw those sci-fi movies back in the Sixties. There's something very DOOMWATCH and Gerry Anderson about it all.
What do you think of huge technological sites like the Hadron Collider and this colossal magnet reader?
It always amazes me how you need the huge, powerful machines to study the incredibly tiny. It is really about the energy needed to pull apart or smash apart bits that want to stick together. We used to have a horseshoe magnet at work that could pick up a steel stool! I used it to find pins that people dropped, you just needed to walk along casually swinging it and the pins would fly off the floor up to it!
ReplyDeleteSupposedly the completed magnet will be 13 Tesla which they say is 280000 times earth mag field.
ReplyDeleteIn realityland 1 Tesla= 1000 Gauss, and Earths mag field is 1 G.
So either this magnet is 13 T =13000 times earths mag field; which just means its a very large but not particularly powerful magnet;
or its 280,000 times earths mag field =280 T which makes it very large and very powerful.
I hope its the second option.
I have played around with a magnet weighing close to 10kg . One person holding the magnet , another holding a piece of scrap angleiron across the poles. Tug of war ensued. With both of us pulling as hard as possible we just managed to get the iron and magnet apart.
Sounds fun that Timmy. Iron Man battles with Magneto!
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