adastra wrote: > > Although this seems right, that the magnet is being depleted I mean, it > still puzzles me. When was the last time you heard of someone changing the > magnets in a PM generator? Or, for that matter, in a DC PM motor? Neither > will work without the magnets, but they don't appear to be consumed in the > process. > > I remember as a kid having the 2 "scotty dog" magnets, one black, one white > (N & S polarities.) You'd put 'em on a tabletop and move one toward the > other. If they were oriented to attract, at some point they would overcome > the friction of the tabletop and accellerate the stationary one toward the > "attractor." This obviously requires a not-insignificant amount of energy. > it seems obvious that the energy must be coming from the magnets. I know it > took energy to make the magnets in the first place, but it is still hard for > me to believe that you could "run down" the magnets by this process any time > soon. > > There are no doubt many discoveries waiting to be made in the area of energy > storage and conversion. I have a hunch that some of the most important of > these will result from a whole new understanding of magnetism. > > At the risk of burning up the OT bandwidth, I would love to hear the > thoughts of this group on this subject. Magnetism, Gravity and Electricity has a real amazing way to interact. Years ago I saw a movie about all the calculations and the way they mix, how you can study one and reach numbers that makes sense to another. It was an amazing way to describe easily something you can try to learn forever. I believe it was from a local university TV channel, it is lost in memory. You can think about the magnetic energy stored into a magnet as gravity, just hang a rock in a piece of wire and tie it high into a pole... you can keep it there for 50 centuries, the energy that attracts each other will never cease or be reduced, they would still attracting each other. At mornings the sun reach the wire and hits it, the wire increase its size, the rock moves down a little, this effect also heats the wire a little more (stretching)... at night, the cool temperature just retracts the wire, what I believe also heats the wire again (by contraction dragging the rock). Of course we are talking about very small non mensurable temperature degrees, but I think it happens. It is somehow a stored sun's energy during the day. The fact is that the rock will still there forever being attracted by the earth's gravity, doesn't matter other interactions of energy. Doesn't matter the size of the mass, density or weight of it, gravity and magnetism are not created from nothing, they are just "arranged", so they can only be "disarranged", not eliminated or reduced. Stars, Planets and Satellites are just showing us all the time that this kind of energy once "arranged" last forever. Different from that, electricity is not "arranged", it is a brute force that just rip off electrons from their natural habitat (charge equilibrium). Those electrons when find a way to come back they do it, reducing this differences. In the electricity example, there is physical material, particles, that are moved (electrons), and they *CAN* move back, so this is why the energy vanishes. Electricity is a pure and simple energy storage system, while you can convert a physical movement and store it, or transport it via wires. In the Gravity or Magnetism example, there is no material involved, there is nothing ripped off, no particles moved or physical change, so there is "nothing to come back", and this is why this kind of energy still "forever". You can not short circuit a magnet and eliminate its potential, if you could, you could also eliminate gravity, what would be a nice thing to do, right? This is why all existent matter in the universe goes to a spherical shape, the best way to accommodate and distribute mass attraction. It is possible to farm fishes into space, just mix some gallons of water and fishes, the mass attraction will form a spherical big ball of water with fishes inside, self contained... of course this *could* happens if pressure and other details could be solved. Monopolo magnets are a dream, because they approaches the gravity function, "matter attracts matter" and this is the best example of monopolo, any matter attracts any other matter, a physical evidence that all the universe is based in a simple and whole physics law about mass and energy. In some way gravity explains and justify the big-bang, as if all matter were separated once, and desperately is trying to come back to the original state. The amazing thought is that "if matter attracts matter, why they all are not already together?" The only explanation is that something big separated and expanded it, with possibilities of someday collapsing all back again to a new big-bang, as if saying "ok, party's over, lets start all over again", as protons in a nuclear bomb, isn't? Truth is that we know very little about it, the minimum necessary to explain and justify how it works, based on how we use it, nothing else. Very few people can explain something before it happens, very few people can explain something after it happens, very few people can understand it at all. After 10 years together I barely can understand my wife's reaction to anything, how could I understand magnetism? Perhaps magnetism is easier :) Wagner