you might think that magnetism might only matter to three kinds of people
physics professors the refrigerator industry and Insane Clown posy fans but
magnetic forces are actually responsible for so many things that we take for
granted in Modern Life including that sweet gaming rig next to you and that
phone in your back pocket now for a long
time electricity and magnetism were thought to be unrelated phenomena but as
our scientific understanding evolved over the years we found that electricity
and magnetism were part of the same fundamental Force called you guessed it
electromagnetism one of the four basic forces that make just about everything
in the universe possible now every
electric current produces a magnetic field from the tiny traces on your
motherboard to huge high voltage power lines that carry electricity across
great distances but this effect is usually weak enough that it's not
obvious or impactful so when we want to
harness magnetism so we can actually do
useful stuff with it the conventional way to achieve this is to Loop a wire
carrying a current around and around many times in order to concentrate the
magnetic field then if you want to get really fancy with a nice strong magnet
you can Loop the wire around a magnetic core iron is great for this this is a
pretty simple concept but it forms the basis for many modern electromagnets
making the electromagnetic force an incredibly versatile tool especially
since you can control how strong the magnet is simply by changing the number
of turns or coils of wire or by
adjusting how much electricity is flowing through them but lonus all I've
ever seen electromagnets used for is picking up cars or scrap metal at the
junkyard how's that relevant to me well
for starters that hard drive that's probably clicking away inside your
computer right now relies on electromagnets to read and write data it
has tiny little heads that look like the needle ARM on a record player that are
really just small electromagnets that Orient the magnetic domains in the
spinning hard drive platter a certain way as it flies past to represent the
zeros and ones of data though current
hard drives rely on thin films rather than conventional coils for writing yay
progress on to another example what if
all that computer use has led to some sort of repetitive strain injury well
your doctor might use magnetic resonance imaging better known as MRI to have a
look at the inside of your hand this works by using a very strong magnetic
fields to excite protons in your body which then actually give off radio waves
that can be captured to form an image
and then when you're done with your uh Imaging and it's time to go home the
ease of varying the strength of an electromagnet as I mentioned before has
even made travel via maglev train
possible electromagnetics attached to the bottoms of these trains push the
entire train up and forward allowing
them to hover over a metal Rail and in doing so travel without friction so
thanks to this the fastest maglev trains today can travel at 270 M or 430 km per
hour fast enough to rival some turboprop
airliners but even if you've never ridden a maglev or had to stick an
appendage in an MRI machine you've still benefited from electromagnets as they
actually supply nearly all of the world's electricity whether most of your
country's energy comes from coal oil hydroelectric solar wind or nuclear
almost all power plants eventually convert whatever kind of energy source
they use into mechanical energy they use that to drive a turbine which
spins a coil of wire surrounded by a large powerful you guessed it magnet
this causes an electrical current to flow through the wire which is sent to
the electrical grid and ultimately to your house so while watching this
episode of Techquickie isn't exactly the same as getting your PhD in physics
hopefully you now understand the fundamentals of electromagnets and how
do they work and you didn't even need to talk to a scientist to do it
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