Crescent Pulsar R wrote:There's one thing I'm curious about, concerning electromagnetic fields. I once saw a documentary a long time ago about how objects fly or float (depending on their weight) in the air when they are in an electromagnetic field (a strong one, I'm supposing), once a person enters said field. I was wondering if that could be put to use, since I've had no success finding anything about it since I recalled it a few years ago.
It's simple enough. Iron is strongly drawn to a magnet (or more exactly, is drawn to regions of increasing magnetic field). It is
ferromagnetic. Some substances are
paramagnetic, and are weakly drawn to a magnet. And some substances are
diamagnetic, and weakly repelled by a magnet. (A superconducting object is strongly diamagnetic; thus the demonstration of a magnet floating in the air above a superconductor.)
Most organic materials are diamagnetic. If you get a powerful enough magnetic field, they'll float in the air above the magnet. I've seen a video featuring a frog, a grasshopper, and an acorn floating. (No, they don't walk into a bar.) If you had a large and powerful magnet,
people would float.
But there is a fly in the ointment. You need a
large and
powerful magnet. The frog in the video was tiny, even smaller than the acorn. I don't think there's a magnet on Earth powerful enough to levitate a
cane toad, let alone a human. And if you did it in the open air, every scrap of iron in the vicinity would home in on the toad/human/youma and smush it.
Jupiter would be well advised to simply use magnetism to control the iron, if the goal is the smushing.
