Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseEXTREME UNIVERSE: What is the strongest magnet in the universe?
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Hey, Daniel, what do you think is the most physics inspired superhero in TV or movies or comics?
Oh? I'm a big fan of Magneto, and not just because I like Michael Fassbender, but because he can control.
Magnets well and does he technically control magnets or is he like a like a magnet.
He's got a magnetic personality. But the thing I like about it is that he can't just like move metal around. They actually thought about the physics of it. He has power over magnetic fields. But wait, isn't he a villain? Doesn't that make physics the science of bad guys? It just means, hey, you better give physics some respect or watch out.
Well, I would have to say, Michael Fassbender is pretty attractive and magnetic, as is Ian McKellen. I'm surprised he didn't go to the Ian McKellen version of Magneto.
I'm surprised you didn't include physicists on your list of attractive people.
Well, I guess, yeah, I guess magnet's repulse as well.
So there's a yin and a yang to everything.
But break it down for us. What is the physics of Magneto?
Yeah, that's basically it. He can control magnetic fields and that's why in the movies you see him lifting anything with metal in it. He can control because of course, magnetic fields can control things that are conductors that can transmit electricity, like metal.
So is that why you became a physicist to try to be a super villain.
Yeah, I wanted to super repel everybody. Well it worked, no, Because I think physics is kind of a superpower. I mean, it helps us understand the universe and then bend it to our will. Insert maniacal cackle here.
Hi, I'm Moray. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics.
Hi, I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist and I'm not a superhero.
And together were the authors of the book We Have No Idea, A Guide to the Unknown Universe, which inspired this podcast.
That's right. It's filled with all the questions about the universe that we don't know the answers to, and so we didn't put them in.
The book, but you can listen to them right now. Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
That's right, our podcast in which we think about all the big questions of the universe and tell you what science does and does not know about them in a way that we hope educates you and makes you laugh.
Yeah, all the everyday physics in your life, and also all the extreme things out there in the universe.
That's right, the attractive stuff and the repulsive stuff.
And so today we are continuing our series of podcasts about universal extremes, or the extremes of the universe.
That's right. And these are some of my favorite podcasts because they really help us understand the context of the Earth and human life and your experience and how everything you thought was amazing on Earth is actually kind of pathetic when you stack it up against what's going on in the rest of the universe.
Wait, are we going to do the same joke we always do the extreme heavy metal riff.
That's right, we are doing. We're drinking mountain dew and talking about the universe.
Extreme Universe, listening to meta AA in the background. That's right.
This is just us pandering to be the official podcast of the next Bill and Ted's excellent adventure movie.
Wish it should have right, we should have him on?
Oh yeah, don't you know Ken?
I know someone who knows Ken, but more imprently, the the other guy goes.
The other guy, it's and the other guy. Is that how you're going to get him to show up? Hey, other guy, would you like to be on our podcast? It's all about extreme Universe.
Well we should talk about it offline. He does live in South Pasadena and I've seen him around.
All right, Well, Bill and or Ted and or the other guy. And if you want to appear in our podcast and talk about the extreme Universe for your awesome new movie, you are welcome to sign up.
And so today we'll be covering another universal extreme and one that is very It's a topic that's very attractive, right, and magnetic.
And simultaneously repulsive. But it really, it really does capture something awesome about physics because this particular element of physics is something that really pulled me in as a kid. I mean, I remember playing with magnets as a kid and feeling like they were kind of a superpower, getting them to push against each other and one float above the other. It feels kind of like magic.
Yeah, it is pretty magical. So today on a podcast, we'll be talking about what is the strongest magnet in the universe.
In the entire universe exactly.
The strongest, most magnetic, most crazy magnet out there that physics can come up with.
That's right, and spoiler alert, the strongest magnet in the universe is not your brain.
You mean my brain or our listener's brains, I.
Mean the average brain. But you might be surprised to learn that your brain actually is a magnet.
Really interesting.
Yeah, Well, you know, one of the things about physics that we've learned the last hundred years is this deep connection between electricity and magnetism. They're based the same thing, and so anytime you have electrical currents, you're going to get magnetic fields, and what's going on in your brain? How do nerves work? How does this whole model of the crazy universe that you understand and you're the way you appreciate jokes and humor. How does that all work? It's electrical firings in your brain. Interesting, you're saying, because we have currents in our brain. Therefore we do sort of generate magnetic fields off a right head. That's right, not sort of. If you think hard enough, you can wipe the credit cards out of your wallet.
Well, I don't need my brain to wipe my credit but even so, but brains work with like ion channels, right, and not necessarily elections. That also creates magnetic field.
That's right. Every charge particle, any current, any moving charge particle, will create a magnetic field. And so these magnetic fields we're talking about, they're not very impressive. They can't actually erase credit cards if you think about them correctly. But there is a magnetic field in your brain. And the unit we use for magnetic fields, it's pretty cool. It's the tesla like how many as it can move? No, you know, tesla?
How many you get to grow a mustache like Tesla.
How many startups can you start in one year? That's one Tesla. No, Tesla of Courus much predates the company, right. The company is named after the inventor and physicist and staggering genius Nikolay Tesla. And he was an early pioneer and understanding electricity and magnetism, and so they named this unit of magnetization after him.
When they named it after him, or he named it like he's one who started measuring magnets.
Oh, that's a good question. The history of the of the Tesla unit. I'm gonna have to look that up later, but I'm pretty sure it was named after him posthumously. I don't know if you can have a unit named after you while you're still alive. I think it's kind of like stamps.
It's a bad form. It's I could discover this amazing thing. I'm gonna name it the Whorehey.
Somebody else has to name it after you, right, That's the way these things usually work. One Tesla is a pretty serious and so for example, like a fridge magnet that you have, you know, and your fridge holds up your pieces of paper or whatever, that's like ten to the minus three tesla. It's like you need a thousand of those to make.
One point one tesla is a fridge magnet.
Yeah exactly, and your brain is ten to the minus twelve tesla, so really doesn't even register. It's like one trillionth of a tesla.
Meaning like if you were to measure the pagnetic field in my head, you know, around my head, that's how strong it would be.
And you know, I don't know how they got this number, and they like stick probes in somebody's head, like somebody signed up to be that experiment. I'm not quite sure, but I guess they must, because you know, they do do these experiments when they stick probes in people's heads. And so somebody decided to measure the magnetic field of the brain.
But it's weak, but it's there. Meaning if I stand next to a fridge, my head is sort of attracted to the.
Fridge, right, that's why you keep going back to the fridge. It's not your stomach, it's your head, exactly. The head keeps pulling you into the fridge.
Yeah no, but really right, that's what you're saying, right, Like there is some attraction between my brain and pieces of metal that's true.
Yes, there is some attraction, and that's basically, you know, the core physics behind inventing a mutant that could actually become magneto. Right, if you somehow had a brain which with super strong currents in it that generated really strong magnetic fields and could control them somehow. You know, dot dot dot, you have magneto.
Interesting, Yeah, could any humans do that? You know, like, you know, if I figure out how to align all the currents in my brain, could I increase the magnetic field.
If you've got a trillion humans and lined up their brains, then yeah, maybe you could be as strong as a pretty weak magnet. I'm not sure that's the best use of a trillion humans, but.
You were saying basically, anything with the current as can have a magnetic field. So even your toaster X as a magnet.
That's right. And it turns out your toaster has a magnet that's about ten thousand times stronger than your brain. There's not that many things one thousand. That's not that many things that your toaster can do better than your brain. One thing is toast bread. The other thing is make a magnetic field a.
A toast bread be burned. That in your house, that's right.
And none of these are very strong compared to of course, the Earth's magnetic field. The Earth's magnetic field is like thirty to sixty micro tesla.
Okay, so that's pretty weak though, right, isn't it.
That's pretty weak. Fride magnet, Yeah, that's right. A fridge magnet is also about ten to the minus three tesla. And that's why, for example, when you make when you have a compass, you need a really fine little filament and has to be balanced on that needle because the magnetic force from the Earth's magnetic field is not very strong, right, It's you don't notice it if it magnet is just sitting on the counter. It doesn't like slide up or rotate towards an Earth's magnetic field. You need a very small piece of metal that can align with the Earth's magnetic field because it's not a strong force.
All right, So today we'll be getting into magnetism and what is the strongest magnet in the un verse? And it's I feel like it's something interesting because not just because it is sort of like magic that we all feel as a kid, but it's so pervasive in our everyday lives. You know, like people listening to this podcast, they're not actually listening to our voice. They're listening to a little tiny magnet in their earphones or speakers making the sounds that we would make with our voices.
Right, that's right. We're all just listening to magnets talking to us all day, following instructions from magnets. Right, magnets are basically in charge of our lives. Yeah, turn left at the upcoming intersection, says this magnet.
Yeah, basically right, Like it's so any any media, TV, movies, podcasts you listen to, or your Alexa that you talk to, or any any of these things. Right, it's all magnets.
That's right. Yeah, there's a little magnet inside every speaker. It's a little electromagnet, and those are really powerful and useful because they can be turned on and off using you know, circuitry. And so you're right, magnets are everywhere, and everyone also has a sort of a rasp of magnetism. Right, it's not like some weird thing out there in space. It's right here, it's in front of us. We can play with it. Everybody has experiences playing with magnets, and so it's something that feels very tactile.
All right, so today we'll talk about what is the strongest magnet? And so, as usual, Daniel, you went out there and wondered if people knew what the strongest magnet in the universe was.
That's right, And as usual with the Extreme Universe series, I really trying to get people to think universal. Don't just think about the Earth or a solar system, think about our place in the universe. And so you'll hear sometimes I prompted people a little bit to think about whether there are big space magnets out there. So think about yourself before you listen. Where do you think the strongest magnet in the universe is?
Here's what people had to say, some black hole on a magnetic field.
I feel like I.
Should know the answer to these questions.
Oh, call the Earth, how about that? Okay? I would just say the gravitational pull stars. But I don't know what that means about gravitation and magnetism at least I don't know. I have no idea.
I have no idea.
Ooh would it be Japan?
I don't have any idea.
The National High Magnetics Build Laboratory, Okay, And how do they make a really high magnet.
It's a combination of these bitter disc copper coils and superconducting coiled wires.
And do you think that magnets here on Earth are stronger than anything else out there in the universe, or they're strongest stronger magnets out there in the universe.
There should be stronger magnets out there in the universe. All right, not a lot of bright ideas here. You didn't attract a lot of very creative answers. A lot of people just said I have no idea.
Yeah, a lot of people have no idea. I like the ones said maybe the Japanese because they seem pretty clever. The last one is really my favorite, because he really knew what he was talking about. And the fun bit is that after I was done interviewing him, he was like, what's this for? And then I described our podcast and he's like, oh my god, I love that podcast. I listened to it every week. He didn't realize that he was going to be on the podcast. It only sunk in afterwards.
Just a random person who listened to this podcast. You interviewed him on the street, Yeah, exactly, So you thought it can happen.
It can happen.
Yeah, yeah, you might be a listener to this podcast and one day you might get asked by a random physicist.
The better chance is if you're walking around in the afternoon at U see Irvine than if you are, you know, in Bangkok or something. But yeah, it could happen to you.
Quantum mechanically, anything can happen.
That's not true.
That's a comic book sign.
That's right. Quantum mechanically, you can't go back in time.
Yeah. Well, I don't think I would answer have every creative answer or accurate answer either. I mean, I don't really know what is the strongest magnet in the universe or where you would find it or how you would make it.
And one of the fascinating things that there's lots of different ways to make magnets, right, you got permanent magnets, you got electromagnets, you've got superconductors, you got crazy stuff going on inside stars, and each of them have their own like limitations for how strong you can get that magnet. So it really it turned out to be quite a rich topic.
But I think we covered this in a little bit in our podcast before. Is that all of these ways of making magnets. They're all sort of the same, aren't they. They're all based on kind of the same quantum mechanical properties of stuff.
That's right. In the end, it all comes down to the same concept, which is moving charged particles. Because of this deep connection between electricity and magnetism. Any time you move a charged particle, that's an electric current, and every current makes a magnet. And that's true of course for electromagnets, which we'll dig into, but sort of counterintuitively, it's also the reason you have that fridge magnets have a magnetic field, or any little permanent magnet, even if you don't see something moving.
Even if it doesn't have a current, it's all based on the same idea.
Yeah, and it sort of does have a current because in the end, like a permanent magnet is a bunch of little magnets that all points in the same direction, and those little magnets in the magnetic field in the end comes from the quantum mechanical spin of that particle. So you have a particle with an electric charge on it, like an ionized atom inside that that magnet, like a piece of iron that doesn't have its charges all balanced and it has quantum mechanical spin. And remember we talked about this on an episode. Quantum mechanical spin isn't actual spin. It's not like a thing is spinning like a top, but it's close enough to spin that the motion of it, the rotation of it, this quantum mechanical version of spin will also generate a magnetic field. So any charge particle that has quantum mechanical spin also has a magnetic field.
Okay, so I think that's a good place to start. So let's start with just your average fridge magnet and how that works. And you're seeing the average fridge magnet works because all of the little particles in it like little magnets themselves, exactly.
And if you just like take a chunk of iron from the earth, then you'll have a bunch of little magnets in it, but they all point in random directions. And that's why, like a random piece of metal that you dig out of the ground is not necessarily a magnet yet, but it has the capacity to be an overall magnet. And what you have to do is get all those magnets pointing in the same direction. And so you can think of it like a billion tiny little magnets. But they're all in random directions.
Right, so they cancel each other out or well.
Yeah, exactly, they cancel each other out. And so overall, this lump of iron is not a magnet. Now what happens if you put that in a big magnetic field. Well, each of those little tiny magnets are going to line up with the magnetic field, because that's what the magnetic field does, It turns magnets. It's like looking at a compass, right, a compass lines up with the Earth's magnetic field. Each of these little iron atoms are a tiny little compass, and if you put them in a magnet, a strong one, they will line up with that magnetic field. And then you take the magnet away and they still are aligned.
They can move around, you know, like, aren't they fixed in a crystal or in some molecule. They can still kind of reorient themselves.
Yeah, they can still reorient themselves. You're right that they're sort of fixed in a crystal, but that effects like the spacing between them. They still have freedom to rotate. Right, It's not like tinker toys where you have where they're fixed by some rod to each other. There is a relationship there, and it comes from a chemical bond, but they do have freedom to rotate still within that crystal.
Do you mean when you say particles you mean like the electrons or the protons. What do you mean exactly inside of those magnet materials?
Well, I think the best thing to do is to think about the whole iron atom right as one, because that's where the magnetic field comes from. But in the end, it does come down to the little particles inside it. You know, this is the standard thing in physics. It's like shells, right. You can think of the magnet as a whole. You can think of the atom irons is having little magnets on them, or you can think of the magnetic field of the atom of iron as being a sum of the magnetic fields of all the protons and the electrons. And that's actually why some kind of materials can be magnets, like iron. It's because the electric fields. It's because the magnetic field don't exactly cancel out, right, whereas other materials where the electron shells are totally filled, then everything just balances and all the magnetic fields of the atom are canceled out.
Oh man, you just blew my mind. Yeah, So in the end, all my life i've known about magnets. I've never known this piece of information. So that's why iron is so special.
That's right, Iron and other materials. Yeah, it's precisely because of the alignment to the electrons and whether the shells are filled. And the cool thing about magnets is that in the end they're quantum mechanical. Like, magnets don't work. If quantum mechanics does, isn't real. So you are holding in your pocket a quantum mag You are listening right now to a quantum magnet.
Well you are, and you're not because it's quantum.
But you're both laughing and not laughing at these jokes.
That's right. It's both good and bad, that's right, exactly. So ei there's something special about iron, that basic configuration of it doesn't cancel out all the little magnets of its electrons and protons.
Yeah, and you know there's something special. But every element don't feel bad, you know, beryllia or hydrogen or whatever. And that's the thing that makes the elements different, right is basically it's all about the arrangement of the electrons in those shells. That's what makes something shiny or not shiny, or active or not active, or you know, a metal or goopy at room temperature or whatever. It's all down to how the electrons fill out their orbitals. It's incredible how rich a variety of stuff you can get, Like the elements are so different from each other, just from how you arrange these same particles. You know. It's just another example of this thing that blows my mind every day that the most amazing things in the universe come from the arrangements of stuff, not from the stuff itself. Right, the same materials make iron as you used to make hydrogen or silken or whatever.
But if you arrange it them in a particular way with a certain amount of each one, then you get a magnet.
Yeah, exactly. And iron's not the only one that can make magnet, right, Other things can be magnets as well.
I guess one thing I've never understood is what exactly is a magnet? And you know, whether we're talking about one particle with a spindre or whatever, or a fridge magnet, Like, what is that?
Like?
Why does it get attracted to metal? Why does metal get attracted to it?
Wow, that's a pretty deep question, what is a magnet? I think it's hard to start from that direction, what is a magnet? I think it's easier to sort of think about the history of the idea, which is like, well, we see this thing, right, the mean, physics is all about describing the things we see. So people discovered magnets, right, Clearly, magnets are real, Right, it's a thing. And so what we did is we developed a mathematical formulation that explains it. Like, Okay, they seem to work this way. When they're further apart, the force is weaker. When they're closer, they're stronger. Only certain things seem to feel them, and they feel them in this circumstance, and you can make this force in that circumstance when you move particles around. Right. So that's what we have is we have this description of the things we've seen, and we try to understand it and simplify it.
So in other words, you you don't.
Know, Well, it depends. Are you asking like why are there magnets? Like could you have a universe without magnets?
You know, well, I guess I'm asking, like, like I know about the electromagnetic force, right, if I have one electron, it repels another electron because we're both negative and they repel each other, right, Like, that's the force. But then why where does this you know, where do fridge magnets?
Okay?
Like? Is the is the electrons in my magnet attracted to or repelled by the you know, electrons in the fridge door? What's going on there?
Yeah? Well, you know the fascinating thing about magnetic fields is they have a north and a south. Right, they have this direction to them, and so the north attracts the south, and the south attracts the north, and north repels the north right. And so in that way, they're very similar to charges, Right, positive and positive repel each other, and positive negative attract each other. For charges. For magnets, it's similar. You have this north in the south. One of the really amazing things about magnetism that I want to cover a whole other podcast, is that you can never have a north by itself. Right Like for electricity, you can have a positive particle over here and it's all by itself, and over there you can have a negative particle it's all by itself. In magnetism, you have to have a north and a south together. There's no such thing as a single north or a single south.
You need both.
You need both, and nobody really understands why. If you could find a single north, we call that a magnetic monopole, then I would actually solve a whole lot of problems in physics. Nobody understands why we've never seen one.
Bring it down from me. So one electron, does it? One electron have a magnetic field or is it just a negative charge?
One electron has a magnetic field because it has a quantum spin, and so what it has is a magnetic north and a magnetic south.
Yeah, so it attracts other electrons and also repels other electrons. How does that work?
Yeah, it depends on the alignments of the fields, right, So if the if electron A, if it's north and south are in the same direction as electron B, then they'll repel each other. If it flips over right so that the north and the south are then closer together, then they'll attract each other. It's just like if you take two magnets, right, two magnet it can repel each other or attract each other just based on the orientation. If you ever try to like stack a bunch of magnets. You'll see this effect. Then you need to arrange them in a certain way so that they the north and the south through a line, so that they stick together, otherwise they'll repel each other.
Wait, so you're saying that two electrons can attract each other if you change the quantum spin? Is that kind of the caveat It's it's not you. You're not just like flipping the electron over, you're changing the spin of it.
Yeah, that's right, because what does it mean to flip an electron over? Right? It's like it's a point particle doesn't have a direction, but its spin has a direction, and if you flip that spin, then they will magnetically attract each other. They'll still electrically repel each other, but there will be a small magnetic attraction if they're magnetic fields are pointed in different directions.
Yes, all right, that blows my mind a little bit.
But magnets are awesome, right, This is why kids said magnets and adults love it.
You're saying sort of like, maybe not think about it too much, just like, let's look at them from what they do, which is that somehow there is once you put a lot of these things together you get this thing that has a north and the south.
And oh man, I never say don't think about it too much. I'm mister think about it too much. I'm professor, think about it too much. No, for sure, I love to talk about like why do we have magnets at all? Like could you have a universe without magnet It'd be fascinating, but it'd be a dark place because remember, light is electromagnetism. Light is an electric field and a magnetic field in balance, slashing back and forth. The electric field creates a magnetic field which goes back to create an electric field. So without magnetism, you couldn't have light, right, and you can have lots of stuff. So universe without magnets would be a dark place.
All right. Well, so that's kind of a general idea of magnets then, right, It's like the alignment of the spins of the particles inside of molecules like iron or items like iron that then add up to make magnet.
That's right. And if you want to make the strongest magnet you can in that kind of setup, right, just with the quantum spins of the particles, then you need to find just the right chemicals, just the right elements to mix together so they have a really strong magnets and all add up. And so people have been doing this for a while and they found that, you know, for example, boron can make magnets and neodymium can make magnets. And so the strongest magnet we've ever built out of sort of a permanent magnet setup is this combination neodymium, iron, and boron together and that makes a magnetic field that's one and a half tesla.
Is that per ounce or per cubic centimeter of magnet? What is that relative to right?
And the unit tesla? That's magnetic field per volume. So it doesn't really matter how big how large physically the magnet is, because it's the magnetic field sort of per space because you know, the more stuff you get, then the more magnet you get, but then it's distributed.
I see. So tesla is take a normalize quantity. Yeah, like it's doesn't matter what scale you're looking at it.
Yeah, if you get two one tesla magnets and you put them together, you don't get a two tesla magnet, you get a twice as big one tesla magnet.
Oh wait, so it is dependent on scale.
Well, the the field doesn't change, right, you had a larger one tesla magnet. If you put two one tesla magnet together, you don't get a two tesla magnet.
So there is something special about these materials neodymium, iron and boron, and especially about that combination that somehow aligns everything really well so that you get a strong magnetic field. What's going on?
Yeah, I don't know. It's a lot of complicated chemistry, and I think it's also just been a lot of experimentation. You know, I'm not sure it's really that well understood. I think people are just like, let's add a little boron, Let's add a little neodymium, Let's see what happens.
You know, you say, let's not think about it as much.
Let's think about it. But it doesn't mean that we necessarily know the answer. But yeah, that's the magic combination, and that's what's set the world record so far on Earth for the strongest permanent magnet. You know, the magnet doesn't require any power input, and you know the magnetic field there. You might wonder like, what where's this energy come from? For the magnetic field, it comes from the s. All these particles, all those tiny little particles inside there are zooming around or not actually zooming with like zooming with their like spin, making this magnetic field. It's sort of awesome.
Things cannot have spin, right, Some particles you can have zero spin.
Some particles kind of zero spin. The Higgs boson has zero spin. But all particles that make matter so fermions, they're all half into your spin particles, which mean they have to have positive or negative spin, so they can't have zero.
Those are fridge magnets, and that's what makes your fridge so attractive.
Next time you just callously put a fridge magnet up on your fridge, think about the billions of tiny little particles that are basically holding on to the fridge for you, just by spinning around.
All right, let's get into electromagnets and the strongest magnets in the universe. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, we're talking about the strongest magnets in the universe, and we talked about fridge magnets. The strongest fride magnet ever made by humans is about one point four tesla, that's right, which is like electric car and then zero point four of an electric car.
I know, it's not just about total misinformation, man, this is an educational podcast.
It's about like it's pretty strong, right, because.
That's pretty strong, right, Yeah?
Yeah, sure, yeah, Like you like, if you stuck that into two of those together, you probably couldn't with your bare hands break them apart.
No, it's a very strong force. Yeah, exactly. One point for tesla is a very strong magnet. But that's about the most you can get out of a fridge magnet or a permanent magnet or any kind of ferromagnetic material. That's what it's called. And the other thing about fridge magnets and permanent magnets is that they're pretty permanent, right, you build this magnet, it takes a lot of energy to change the direction of all those particles, make it go to another direction, or to balance it out or something. And sometimes you want a magnet that you can turn on and off right, or that you can flip the other direction, like you want to build an electric engine or a speaker or something like that.
That's the other kind of magnets that we're going to talk about, which is electromagnets exactly.
And these work on basically the same principle, which is moving charges generate a magnetic fields. And so instead of relying on the charges like spinning weirdly quantum mechanically to make tiny middle magnets, you just take those particles and you move them along, Like take a battery and drag a bunch of electrons through a watre. What happens You get a magnetic field that goes around the wire, makes these circular magnetic fields around the wire. And that's happening all the time. Like every electrical wire in your house, you know that's on it has occurrent through it. There's a magnetic field there and you can see this. You just like turn on two wires near each other, and you'll see them like jump towards each other or away from each other because of the magnetic fields.
And so then the idea is that you and you can build those up. You know, that's why motors have coils, right, and electromagnet You wind up the wire and each time you wind it up, you're sort of building and building the magnetic field onto itself.
Yeah, So holding your mind the image of a wire and then draw around it sort of a circle that has an arrow, and that's the direction of the magnetic field. Now, if you bend the wire to a circle, then you notice that those circular magnetic fields are all pointing in the same direction at the center of that circle. If you make a wire, you put it into a circle, then a magnetic fields around that wire all adds up to push in the same direction at the center of the circle. And so that's where you get the strongest magnetic field.
You focus it. It's like focusing the magnetic field by putting it in the loop.
Yeah, it's adding them all up constructively, and you're not changing their directions. You're just getting them all to push in the same direction at once. So if you're For example, if you're a magnet in the center of a loop of wire, then you're feeling the magnetic field from all the electrons all the way around that loop, all at the same time, right, And so that's where the strongest, the strongest field is there in the center. And you want it stronger, add another loop. You want it stronger, add another loop. And that's why electromagnets have all those coils, because every coil means more current. It just adds more magnetic field.
Yeah. Like if you open up a motor, electric motor or a speaker, you'll see like the little copper lines just going around and around and around. That's the electromagnet.
That's the electromagnet. And the really cool thing is turn off the current boom magnet goes away reverse the current magnet points the other direction right, And that's you can use an electromagnet to control, for example, the vibrations of the surface of a speaker. That's how that's how we make a speaker make sound, right, is that it turned on and off that electromagnet really fast and it shakes the surface of the speaker, and that's what makes the sound.
That you hear. Yeah, it's amazing.
It is really amazing. Yeah, and it also works the opposite direction. Right. If you just take a magnet and you move it through a coil of wire, what happens, Well, you get an electric field, So you get an electric current through the coil, and that's what a generator is.
All right. So then that's how you make a kind of an artificial electromagnetic field, right, not like a fringe magnet.
Yeah, but what's artificial about it? It's it's still nature, it's still physics, it's still real.
Yeah, but you have to put the electro in front of it for a reason, that's true, but just not a magnet. It makes it sound like electromagic.
The way you say it makes it sound like I have like a weird after taste or something like, you know.
So then that's an electromagnet. And so this is where we can now get into really big magnet, right, Like we can go way past naturally metallic magnets with electromagnets.
That's right. And the thing about this is that it requires a continuous source of power. Right. You can't just build an electromagnet and then walk away from it. You have to keep powering it. And when you stop powering it, it turns off. But these magnets can get really strong, and in fact, the best way to make them even stronger is you make a coil of wire like we talked about before, but then you put a permanent magnet in the middle of it, and the two sort of add in this resonant way to make you an even stronger magnet.
Like a magnet on steroid, exactly juicing it up.
It's a magneton magnet interaction that makes this. It lines up all the little magnetic domains and they enhance each other and so you get this. It's called a resistive magnet, a resistive electromagnet, and those can get really powerful. Wow.
How powerful? So what's the strongest steroidal magnet that we've made on Earth?
So it's this awesome project and Florida State and they call it Project. I think it's named after the spinal tap thing like this magnet goes to eleven.
And really not after the Stranger Things character.
No, No, I think it's These guys are a little older than that, so I think their references are probably dated. But their magnet goes up to just over forty one tesla.
Wow. Yeah, that's a lot, because it's it's like forty times the strongest metallic magnet right in which you couldn't even separate with your hands.
Yeah, thirty or so times. And they use this particular configuration. They actually don't use wire. They use these helical plates because it spreads out the energy a little bit more so it prevents it from overheating. It's invented by a guy named Bitter. His last name is Bitter b it t Er, and so it's called a bitter magnet. Now I wouldn't I don't know what it tastes like, and I don't know how their competitors feel. But it's a bitter victory and they have the strongest magnet.
Wow, this might be a case where maybe naming it after yourself is maybe not the best idea. What if you should have picked your first name, you know, the dawn magnet, or what if you're magnet.
Is grumpy or something, you know the grumpy principle, the grumpy theorem, or what.
If your name is like magnets, it's the magnus magnet.
That would have beit awesome, the Magnecius magnet on Earth.
So so then you can get up to forty one tesla.
That's as far as they've gotten so far. Yeah, and the thing that really limits them is that there's a huge amount of energy. There's all this current going through it, and basically this thing will just melt itself. And so the thing that keeps them from going higher up is that the thing just gets too hot. And so the current effort these days is like how to get the heat out of there. You know, they have like water cooling and they have these air baffles, and you know, it's just a huge source of energy.
They're pumping so much juice into this magnet, so much current that it literally like melts down. It's hard to keep it from blowing.
Up, exactly because all this wire is carrying this current, and all wires have some resistance, right, and anytime you pump a current through a wire that has some resis it's going to heat up. That's what the resistance is. And so if you're generating huge currents to make huge magnets, you're going to get a huge amount of heat and eventually the thing will just melt down. So that's what they're working on is to try to cool it off, and that actually leads us to the next kind of magnet, which tries to limit the resistance.
If you can reduce the resistance of the wires, then you can pump more current through exactly.
And so some people, like for example, at the Large Hadron collider, we need really strong magnets to bend the particles going in a circle because remember particles that have charges, we'll feel a magnetic force, they'll get bent. And so the way we make particles move in a circle the particle colliders is we have these really strong magnets and we use superconducting magnets, and the way that works is basically the same as any other electromagnet, except you use superconducting wire, which means there's much less resistance, so it's much less heat lost and you get more current, and a huge current means big magnet.
So you basically, i mean, when you have a superconductor, we talked about this in a podcast, you basically have zero resistance, right.
Almost zero, yeah, exactly. Almost.
It's like a free wire kind of like as much current as you want.
Yeah exactly, and the current just flies through with almost no resistance, and so most of the energy is then just going to the magnet and it's not heating the thing up, it's not going to make it melt down.
So then what's the strongest magnet we can make with that?
Well, there's a group in the US, it's the National Magnetic Field Laboratory, and they've made a thirty two tesla magnet. And you might think, huh, why isn't that stronger than the resistive magnet? Right? And the reason is that, you know, you can do superconductivity. But we have this whole episode about how it works. It's a little bit delicate. It requires the electrons to move in pairs, et cetera. And if you have too strong a magnetic fields, it interferes with the superconductivity. So like, you can use supercondunctivity to make a really strong magnet, but if you do, if you make it strong enough, it'll ruined this super conductivity of your wires.
Oh I see, it's like you made it too good that it just breaks down the laws of physics.
For nothing breaks the laws of physics, man, but.
Laws they make it a super conductor.
Yeah, exactly, it ruins the super conductivity. But so that goes up to thirty two tesla and that's pretty powerful.
But then you're saying that you can combine all these things to get like an ubermega like a voltron type of magnet.
Yeah, exactly, as usual, the best way to do something in physics is to like combine all the other best ideas and see what you get. And so some folks made a bitter magnet, right, that's this thing with a helical plates so that they do distribute the heat and the current, et cetera. And then they added superconducting wires to that. So it's a combination bitter resistive magnet and the super and superconducting wires. And they got up to forty five tesla. And that's again at the Florida State University Magnet Lab. So they're the current reigning champions.
Through the most magnetic that's right.
The most attractive and repulsive lab in the history of.
They attract the best students, that's right.
But these are all magnets that are sort of sustained.
Right.
You can turn this magnet on, you can keep it going for a little while until it overheats. These are the magnets that are sustained. If you want to generate like really strong magnetic fields, you can do it in a way that is not sustainable.
Okay, you can do it like a momentary, like a like blow it all up in one magnetic moment.
Yeah, you can get really brief strong magnetic pulses basically, And the way they do this is they use explosives and it compresses the magnetic field inside the electromagnet as you pulse it. So you turn on the electromatic and you like surround it with bombs basically, and it compresses the whole magnet so that very briefly, for like a few microseconds, you have a magnet that's up to like thousands of tesla.
So if I squeeze a magnet, it makes it more magnetic.
Yes, because remember that the unit tesla is per volume. So if you can get the same magnetic stuff into a smaller space than the magnetic field is basically higher. So they use explosives to compress it to briefly get a super magnet.
For a few microseconds, you can have a magnet that's like a couple thousand.
Tesla, yeah, exactly, And that's not something you can sustain because obviously you're blowing up the magnet as you're making it. But just sort of like you know, at point of principle, can we do this? Some people are doing these kind of explosive magnet experiments.
That's terrible for a cell phone reception, exactly.
It's also not great for your speaker and your iPhone, all.
Right, so that those are all sort of man made magnets, right like here on Earth. With human engineering, you're saying, the most we can get to sustain is a couple of dozen tesla, and in microseconds, the most we can get to is a couple thousand tesla. That's right, it's like the peak of human magnetic achievement.
That's right, exactly. So far that's the most magnetic we've gotten.
But then we can get out, go out into space, and then things get crazier.
Right, that's basically always true. Go out into space, things get.
Crazy, things get crazy. All right, Well let's get crazy, Daniel. But first let's take a Q break.
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All right, so we cover human magnets, meaning magnets we can make or magnetic moments.
And mag time of your brain. Right, that's also a human magnet.
Right right, and superheroic magnets. We've covered all that in our imaginations. But now now things get crazy when you go off into space because you can have crazy magnets out there.
That's right. And you know, let's remind ourselves, like the Earth has a magnetic field, and that magnetic field we think comes from like things slashing around inside the Earth. Basically again, you know charged currents, right, these current into sort of like charged ionized rock slashing around. The magma inside the Earth is somehow making a magnetic field. But that's only like thirty or sixty micro tesla. And if you go out, you leave the Earth, right then the Moon doesn't have a very strong magnetic field, but the Sun does. The Sun it's a magnetic field to be much stronger than the Earth. But even that is not that strong. Like when you get a sun spot, you know, some really concentrated bit of magnetism, it gets up to like zero point one tesla. So the really yeah, which is a lot more than the Earth's magnetic field, but it's not you know, it's not stronger than the magnets we can make in the lab here on Earth. So we have the strongest magnets in the Solar system here on Earth, well that we know of. That we know of. Yeah, that's true.
That we you know, we've flown here the Sun's champs.
That's right. We are more powerful than the Sun. Man, that's pretty impressive.
But I thought sunspots could you know, like wipe out communications and stuff like that.
Yeah, they can, but that's mostly because of the flux of charged particles. It's basically like, throwsy huge number of protons at the Earth and that can wipe out your electronics.
Oh, I see, it's not the magnetic field. It's like it's the throwing stuff at us.
Yeah, exactly, it's basically shooting us with tiny bullets and that's bad. But you know, not just in our solar system. In that you were talking about the universe right then, there are very powerful magnetic fields, and we talked about, for example, weird kinds of stars and neutron stars, this really strange kind of star you get sometimes after the collapse of a star and a star burns and it uses most of its fuel and then gravity that takes over because when a star is burning, it's exploding, and that's keeping it from getting too dense. But once it stops burning, then gravity just takes over and it squeezes it down harder and harder, and eventually you can get a star where the pressure is so great that everything becomes a neutron essentially. And then you get this neutron star, and for reasons we don't understand, because we don't know how what's going on inside it and what's slashing around. The magnetic fields there can be enormous, really, yeah, they can be up to a million a million tesla.
Okay, wait, so it's a neutron star. So it's a whole bunch of neutrons squished together. And so my first question is why is it even generating a field? Isn't it all neutral?
Yeah, it's all neutral, right, But remember neutrons are made of quarks, and quarks do have charges, and so quarks have little magnetic fields, and so something about the you know, how the quarks are slashing around and what's going on with those neutrons is generating a magnetic field. But again, we don't really understand it very well. It's sort of a mystery.
A million teslas. So how do we even know this number? How did we know? How can we measure the magnetic field from back here of a neutron star out there?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's not like we're throwing fridge magnets out there, right.
Does the iron fillings sprinting it around?
That would be awesome. No. As usual in astronomy, you can't usually construct experiments. You just have to observe them, right, And so what you do is you look at the motion of particles near these things. You look at like ionized gas, How is it getting moved? You know, if it's flowing in this direction and then it turns. You can measure the magnetic field basically by the flows of gas nearby these objects and other particles. Yeah, and then you have said, like how strong does the magnetic field have to be? So that explains what we're looking at.
So you can look at it and say that's a million tesla magnet right there.
Yeah, exactly. And you know some of these stars get even super weird, right like, and we don't understand it, but some neutron stars get into this really strange state and that they're called a magnetar and of course they're called the Magnetar. Not just because that's a super weird, awesome name and kudos to whoever came up with it. And it sounds like the kind of sword you might yield in some weird science fiction to still be in universe, but because they have like a something, it sounds like Magneto's car.
Yeah, there you go, Hey, pull up the Magnetar.
I gotta go out for dinner. I gotta go pick up Yeah, exactly, we're gonna go. We got some things to talk about. And these things are crazy. I mean, these are ten to the eleven tesla, right, so remember like the sun is less than a tesla, a neutron star is a million tesla. These things are almost a million, a billion, almost a trillion tesla.
Wow, ten thousand million teslas.
Ten almost ten million million, right, ten to the twelve is ten to the five. It's ten thousand is that what you said? Sorry? One hundred thousand million tesla?
People with PhDs? What come for a podcasts? Too? Simple? Man?
Learning to count to eleven with Daniel and Jorhea, This one goes to eleven.
Daniel Jorge explained, simple counting.
Yeah, but these things are insane, right, Like, what is it like to be there? Like it would shred you? You know, the powerful the forces there are so powerful we don't even really understand what would happen.
Would you feel it? Like if I was next to a magnetar would I feel attracted or shredded by it? Because I'm pretty neutral, not just politically but in terms of magneticness.
Right, Well, I think your body relies on electrical currents to control itself, and your brain does so it would definitely have an effect on all the charged particles in your brain and all the currents that are happening in your body, and so you couldn't think. You couldn't think, And it might even like rip all the iron out of your blood cells, which doesn't sound good, not really recommended.
Which has happened in comic books with Magneto, by the way, Is that right?
All right? The comic writers have thought about that. Magneto is a physics inspired comic hero. That's why I like him so much. I mean he's a bad guy, all right, you know, but yeah he's in the in the recent movies, he turns around, he helps the X Men a little bit, so you know.
Yeah, I know, he's he's not a bad guy. They kind of put him as he's like the Malcolm X t exaviors Marthin Luther King.
Oh, I see, he's got more complicated arc. He's not clearly good or bad.
Yeah, he's he's just a different philosophy.
Killed the humans, that's his philosophy.
Yeah, basically he's just misunderstood.
S what you want about the tenets of Magneto. At least it's a at least it's an ethos.
And he has a cool power. All right, So would you say then that's the strongest magnet in the universe a magnetar, which is a weird inexplicable neutron star.
Yeah, that's the strongest magnet we're aware of in the universe. And you know there are other strong magnets like black holes can also have magnets around them, like these blazers, these jets of particles that are aligned to go perpendicular from the plane of a galaxy. We think there's some sort of magnetic thing happening there. We don't really know how strong it is, but there are really really powerful magnetic fields out there in the universe.
That would just shred you to bits and if you're near it.
That's right, and it would tear all the magnets off your fridge. So if you have like some really complicated like fridge scrabble game going.
On, don't take a picture.
Yeah, take a picture, and don't bring it when you go visit the magnetar.
In fact, don't bring your fridge at all, you know, because you're not coming back.
How you're going to have cold drinks? Man, you can't travel through space without cold.
Drinks, all right, So we got to our answer, that's the strongest magnet in the universe that we know about.
That's right. Once again, the universe dwarfs what's happening here on Earth. We have all these people spending millions of dollars to make really powerful magnets, but there are orders of magnitude weaker than what's happening out there in neutron stars and magnetars. So we have a ways to go.
People, But I think it's cool to remember that there are magnets everywhere. You know, you're listening to us through magnet and the idea that your body has a magnetic field and your brain is generating electromagnetic field. Just thinking about and processing the words that you're listening right now.
That's right. Your whole nervous system runs on electromagnetic fields, so you basically are a magnet.
You, dear listener, are very magnetic and attractive. All right, thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoyed dad. We'll see you guys next time.
Before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorge dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases, many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as Dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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