al@gtx.com (Alan Filipski) (04/09/91)
There was an interesting letter in the 7 Feb 1991 issue of Nature
entitled "levitation of organic materials". The authors, E. Beaugnon
and R. Tournier of the CNRS in Grenoble, report that they have
levitated many kinds of weakly diamagnetic materials such as wood,
plastic, water, ethanol, and acetone in strong magnetic fields. The
levitation was done at room temperature within the 5 cm cylindrical
bore of a "hybrid" magnet (I put "hybrid" in quotes because I don't
know what it means in this context). The field strength used to
levitate water, for example, was about 27T, generating a gradient of
the square of the field of about 3000 T^2/m. The authors explain that
this gradient is related to the force produced on a given diamagnetic
object.
I'm curious about the possibility of generating gradients like this on
a large scale so that, say, a person's body could be levitated. Given
the above numbers, would this be technically possible? Would the
great field strength or gradient thereof have any significant effect
on, say, electrical activity in nervous tissue or other life processes?
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( Alan Filipski, GTX Corp, 8836 N. 23rd Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85021, USA )
( {decvax,hplabs,uunet!amdahl,nsc}!sun!sunburn!gtx!al (602)870-1696 )
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P.S. I am cross-posting this to talk.origins because there has recently
been discussion there of some crackpot quasi-Velikovskian theory of
wierd gravitational or electromagnetic effects allowing dinosaurs to
grow huge. I thought this might fan the flames there a little.