Some Science to Levitate With

Watching this was very therapeutic. No talking, no music just the ambient sounds.
Enjoy.

A few points of interest to me

1. The metal started tilted on an axis then rolled. Made me think of earth and the great roll.
2. If the metal started as a ball would it have been spinning the whole time? It only started to spin as it became more spherical.
3. Love the marbling, granite looking pattern after it drops and flops.

This Individual has some other cool experiments too.

Here’s another one soothing to watch.

Im sure some ATSer will correct me if I am wrong.

It appears as if that metal is being heated up via an induction current, and this explains the rolling/rotation.

An induction furnace heats things up through high amounts of electro-magnetic energy passing through the coil. When you have current passing around something magnetic, it exerts a force on it, and you see an attempt to counteract this in the induction loop via the looped section in the copper pipe. The force exerted follows the "right hand rule" ( en.wikipedia.org... ) along the path of the current through the induction loop.

If it started out as a ball, it would probably begin to spin right away, and the reason the cylinder didn't is most likely due to it being a metal, and thus exerted an electro-magnetic force as well augmenting and counter acting the right had rule preventing it from rolling right away.

Now for the fun part the metal that was dropped into the induction furnace took on the round shape it had, and eventually dropping. When magnetic metals (even ones with very weak magnetic properties that don't exhibit them in normal conditions) are in a solid form they are made up of crystals with similar polarity, the more magnetic the metal more likely these crystals will line up with one another and exhibit the properties of your every day magnet. However as this metal is heated up in the induction loop, these crystals disassociate with one another due to the heat breaking down the crystal structure, and lose their magnetic properties. You can see as it heats up it stars forming a rounder cylindrical shape as gravity is also acting on it pulling some of it's mass downward, until the metal is completely melted. Once the metal is completely melted there is no longer anything holding the crystals together, and the magnetic force applied to it from the induction loop can no longer hold it in place. Resulting in that beautiful granite looking splatter at the end of the video.

Also I just cheated, and found out that the metal used here is aluminum, which normally isn't considered magnetic, but under instances of very strong magnetic fields it does show characteristics of a magnetic metal.



and there are a lot of "stick" jokes in the comments section. I highly recommend using google translate for them.

a reply to: dubiousatworst

Thanks for the reply and explanations.
Interesting that it’s aluminum. Also I wonder if it’s taking the shape of field that surrounds it. Or like you said is it teardroped because of gravity.

I believe he turned off the device to make the aluminum drop. I wonder how long that orb of aluminum could maintain its mass like that, and how hot it could go.

I assume the stick jokes about him poking the orb with the pencil. It’s not a real science unless you can poke it with a stick.

Also just in some followe up research I found this about the Lenz Effects.
Aluminum Moving Magnets

a reply to: Observationalist

Boyd Bushman, engineer of "renown" (aka, huckster), tried to convince people that the Lenz effect was a demonstration of anti-gravity. Because everyone knows aluminum is not affected by magnets.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: Phage

Thanks for the link to your post with another cool video with aluminum. The study you linked to in it is gone though. I’ll dig around and find some more info. Either way I got me a new respect for aluminum.

a reply to: Observationalist

Any non-magnetic conducting metal will display the effect.

a reply to: Phage

Having fun learning about all this.
Check out this old video from 1975 with Eric LaIthwaite

Magnetic River?
Eric Makes a model aluminum train float over magnetics. He explain the process so well from basics understanding of magnetics to this magnetic river concept. To which he shows how you can control levitating aluminum.