| Maxwell's per square centimeter |
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| Thing-A-Day-2009 |
| Saturday, 21 February 2009 00:00 |
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Today I played around with trying to visualize magnetic fields. I started off by filing a steel screw to make iron filings. Then I laid a sheet of paper on top of a magnet, sprinkled the filings on the paper surface and gently tapped to reveal the magnetic lines, It was harder than I expected. The filings are quite happy to attach themselves to the poles of the magnet in a big blob, but less willing to nicely follow the magnetic filed lines. Maybe my iron filings were too coarse. Maybe my sprinkling technique was too inelegant. Maybe my tapping technique was too rough. Maybe the magnets were too strong. The strongest magnet I used came from a magnet clacker set. As you can see, the filings tend to cluster right around the magnet or lie outside its field of influence. No clear magnetic lines here.
I then tried some magnets from magnetix set (apparently now called magnext) and they gave better results.
A single magnetix element showing nice magnetic field lines proceeding from both poles.
Two magnetix elements with repelling poles facing each other. This gave nice field lines as well.
My favourite shots had nothing to do with magnetic field lines. They were of the iron filings bunched up around the clacker magnet:
I particularily like the shadow on this one:
My original thought for the title was “Fluxing Around” |
Comments
I am very impressed by your thing-a-day. I think this is what makes your living different from ours. If we are able to take our eyes off technology to spend time doing handicrafts with the family like these, perhaps life would be more enriching than for me to be obsessed about twitter & my facebook.
Trust me, none of these things came easily. I would agonize the whole day over what I was going to do.