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Ever see an electromagnet crane at a junk yard?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ...

You can make one yourself with a nail, some copper wire, and a battery.




That's pretty darn far from what we're talking about here. The comparison is absurd.


How so? It's literally an invisible (to the eye) field that can lift hundreds of pounds.

And magnetic fields are directly related to electric fields. It's called electromagnetism for a reason.


Of metal, yes. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about force fields in the sci-fi sense. An invisible wall that a person can't pass through.


The article is about an electrostatic field. That's far from sci-fi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field


I was clarifying the sense I was using the term "force field". Not a generic field of electromagnetic forces, but the fantastical one that can contain arbitrary matter.

Like the one described in the article, that a person was leaning against and could not pass through. If this were something that we could reproduce, it would have awesome real-world uses. Like a real hover board! Or the best anti-theft protection for my parked car.


You could though. Given a sufficiently strong enough positively (or negatively) charged electric field and yourself equally positively (or negatively) charged sufficiently you could have an 'invisible' wall that you couldn't walk through. Assuming that neither yourself or the field you're walking into has anywhere to discharge to.


Can an electromagnetic move organic material?


Extremely powerful fields can levitate a frog - so yes.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/how-did-you-g...


Probably not in a useful way; the induced currents would produce far too much heat.


If it's strong enough, probably. I mean, MRIs kind of work that way.


Yes the 45 Tesla magnet in Tallahassee can levitate small non ferrous things like a strawberry in a little tube and draws 56 megawatts about 7% of the cities power grid.




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