Created and maintained by Bill Beaty. Mail me at:
.
|
|
|
|
ABOUT SPHERICAL SUPER MAGNETS
|
|
|
more videos , also physics collection
So now an unskilled adult can play with the larger supermagnets without
experiencing blood loss or sudden violent pain. Don't worry, it still
takes plenty of skill to handle the 1.5" spheres. Even the experts have
scars and stitches. DANGER: Don't leave them out on your desk, or you'll
be performing some inadvertent Natural Selection upon curious passersby.
Plus erasing all their credit card stripes. At work I leave my largest
ones stuck to a big nitrogen cylinder chained to the wall. Some people
can't even figure out how to pull them loose.
Then the guy at http://www.engconcepts.net/ started selling 3/8" supermagnet
beads at very low quantity prices (like $.30 each.)
|
|
more videos
The things are VERY COOL in quantity. Long chains of them act
like biology: rings will merge or peel apart like bacterial plasmids.
You can spiral the chains up to make spiral-phase nanotubes or tobacco
mosaic viruses. Make a ring-triangle of 3 beads, then roll a 4th towards
it. The ring eats the bead, becoming a square. Chemical reaction?
Molecular self-assembly? Roll a 5th in, and the ring snaps it up,
becoming a pentagon. Add another, and sometimes it just sticks to the
outside. The surface energy of your 2D molecule is too low. It needs
to be highly stressed. So make a long linear chain, stick an extra magnet
beac to the side, then pull on the chain. The chain eats the bead,
becoming longer.
Take 60 beads, make twelve rings of 5 magnets each, then carefully merge
them into a pseudo-buckyball ('pseudo' because they have4 bonds per atom
instead of three, with squares instead of hexagons!) Note that the
sense/antisense polarity of the pentagons cannot be ignored (so you can
make "chiral" buckyballs, some with CW polarity, some with CCW.) Some
supplier needs to make some beads with quadrupole magnetization rather
than dipole, so a *true* buckyball can easily be made. (You can still
make a true buckyball using 60 steel balls with lots of short supermagnet
rods connecting them. But it's a big pain when compared to a buckyball
made all of spheres.)
After a couple of hours I was able to simulate a buckyball origin: make
two hemispheres of 30 magnets each, which when brought together will
suddenly knit up into the 'buckyball' shape and entrap any ions which
happen to get between 'em. Always wondered how that occurred.
The girlfriend now has chains of alternating gold and black beads. Play
with dipole chain pseudo-biomolecules, then hide them as jewlery, as a
spiral-wrap bracelet. (Hmmm. Reassemble the bracelet with black and gold
Morse Code patterns for the well dressed amateur radio nerd?!!)
> It's a great price for the big one! The obvious thing to do is to order
Put them in a thick styrofoam box. The fields at the box surface are low.
Then wrap the box in thin iron sheets. The iron doesn't saturate. Or, if
you bought a bunch of the things, they can be shipped formed into a ring
where the field is internal to the ring and only 'leakage' fields escape.
A single enormous magnet is harder to ship. Two of them can be rotated
oppositely to mostly eliminate the distant dipole field.
Next: Fun with supermagnet beads > >LINKS |
.