John said:
The 1.4 megagauss number is absurd; kilogauss, maybe. I seriously
doubt the part about separating the iron out from one's blood, too;
superconductive MRI magnets are far more powerful than any PM can ever
be, and have no such problems. And no small magnet is going to affect
a color TV from three feet away.
This guy sounds like a fathead, hardly a humorist.
A megagauss is 50 teslas. No way in Hell - not even for a two-stage
supercon magnet plus a conventional core. The only two ways to get in
the megagauss region are to either push a whole huge laser capacitor
bank through a metal loop, flashing it to plasma in the process; or
cool a pre-stressed armored conventional magnet with a river of high
pressure water and push a DC powerplant through it (Ritter magnet, but
not for long).
The force of magnetic attraction depends on field divergence. Trace
the field lines of a dipole sphere - wow! It would be a great
micro-gee experiment for International Space Station Freedom FUBAR
Space Hole One Alpha. You float two spheres with facing opposing
poles a fair distance apart and ready your triggered high speed
camera. They will smash together almost explosively (hopefully
killing everybody aboard with shrapnel and letting the huge stupid
expensive worthless nightmare deorbit to its welcome destrucuton).
Uncle Al has a pair of fair-sized Fe-Nd-B magnets, with a book in
between. You handle those puppies with great respect and keep the far
away from computers and TVs. Even a Helmholtz pair of ceramic ferrite
magnets from a microwave oven are dangerous if you get your flesh in
the way when they kiss. NEVER allow a pair of magnets like that to
freely slam together.
It would be intesting for Oxford Magnets to try hydroponically growing
seeds in the bore of one of their really high field supercons during
required shakedown. Photosynthesis is all about charge, hence triplet
spin, segregation. Twenty teslas on a well-chosen flower would be the
cat's pajamas: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they
toil not, neither do they spin!"