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About the Author: Physics Girl

47 Comments

  1. Without the magnetic film (which is also cool), you can take one of those refrigerator magnets with the stripes and carefully cut off one of the stripes with a pair of scissors. It works best with a rectangle. It's not an easy cut, due to how slim and long it is, but I have faith in you.
    Then you can take that strip you removed, and hold it gently, and drag it across the stripes. The strip will bounce up and down, being attracted and repelled by each alternating stripe in the magnet.
    It's pretty trippy the first time you see it (if you don't already know about the stripes, that is). I love to show this to physics majors and ask them if they can figure it out before I pull out the magnetic film. Often I'll tell them to listen first, before I tell them to look closely at the strip and then try it themselves.

  2. So awesome! My goal is to one day collab with MKBHD he incorporates a lot of knowledge about science into his studio and his reviews.

  3. Thank you internet provider for letting me load this YouTube video in 144p…. If I wanted to watch such a grainy video I'd just watch Pewdiepie.

  4. Thanks, it's so awesome that I know now that there is someone else who gets as excited about magnets as I do. You have this one reaction in this video, where I think I felt exactly the same. Well as exact as one can get when approximating someone else's emotions. LOL.. So awesome, I am not alone!!

  5. I first noticed the stripy pattern by putting two identical fridge magnets back to back. You can slide them relatively smoothly in one direction, but they "jump" when you try to move them relative to each other in the orthogonal direction. Some magnets will even detach briefly during the jump.

  6. It would be cool to take computer chip technology to make a whole bunch of microscopic wires on a silicon cylinder to have an electromagnet with an incredible number of wraps and extremely strong.

  7. Ahh. You missed an opportunity:
    Once you damage the Halbach array, you should've checked to see if the damaged spot regained its magnetism on the back side.

  8. This is how old I am. I worked at Radio Shack back in the days when TVs still had cathode ray tubes. Radio Shack sold electronic components, including the kinds of magnets that delivered a stronger magnetic attraction than the letters that are a hallmark of the refrigerator door. We had a few at the service desk, and I had occasion to move one of them past the screens of televisions we had as display models and watch the distortion effect they had on the colors of the image.

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