Beams of white light are appearing in the skies. These are unlike the typical UFO report of a UFO (assuming there’s a “typical” UFO report.) A Wisconsin witness reported to the local MUFON chapter their sighting of a bright white light that lit up acres of her land:
“As I looked out the window there was suddenly a very bright light in the sky, flashing, getting brighter and spreading in all directions” the witness stated. “It filled a good part of the night sky and seemed to hang there, like in slow motion and it left me with what I call an afterglow, like one would get when a flashbulb goes off in your eyes. I did not hear any sound with it…”
MUFON chapters in California have been getting reports of these odd beams of white lights, and blue lights. And the following encounter with a white beam of light includes a humanoid figure — a “mottled brown and black reptile humanoid figure.” — in the beam.
A hundred miles or so from where I live in Eugene, a West Linn area witnesses reported to Oregon MUFON last month seeing “3-4 quick pulsating flashes straight over us coming from above the clouds. They were so bright that the entire park and surrounding neighborhood was lit up. There were no audible sounds . .”
I’m not sure why but these cases seem a bit creepy, which is a purely subjective feeling and not based on anything, I know. Just thought I’d put it out there. But that’s my intuitive feeling on first read. That aside, there are some interesting points about these stories.
The lights don’t emit sound, are almost blindingly white or with a blue cast, lighting up large areas, which suggests a high tech, man made weapon/tool/object of some kind. Mind games? Weapon? But then there’s that reptilian entity seen by one witness. Always assuming the witness isn’t a liar or delusional, the entity seen is either real, or made to appear real. Is this a sort of Project Blue Beam scenario being played out?
White beams, blue beams, and a strange black UFO that left one witness stunned on March 1st:
“I was pacing I suddenly noticed a strange lack of noise. It felt like everything just kind of stopped. The I heard a very high pitched sound and looked up. While the sky was dark, a VERY large circle that was darker than the sky and contrasted well was just above me. It was perfectly still, as though it was a fixture in the sky.”
After staring at the weird object the object seemed to have “sucked all the air ” out of him, causing the witness to sit down for awhile before he could move.
In some ways these cases remind me of the Texas, Stephenville UFO sighting involving the odd beam of light that stopped a few feet above the ground on witness Margie Galvez’s property.
Are these sudden, “new” type of UFOs a military weapon or tool, being tested on civilians? It seems more like man made technology than the sudden arrival/take-over of reptilians alien overlords. Which leaves me with the following thought. As I commented in 2008 on UFO Magazine’s blog about the Stephenville beam seen by Margie Galvez:
. . . it’s creepy either way, for if that beam was due to alien spacecraft, enough said. If that beam was due to a top secret human made technology, equally creepy. What are we planning to do with such a beam? Do they have something to do with cattle mutilations, for example? If so, the fact that our military and very likely our industrial-global -corporate complex is responsible for all the gory, intrusive, murderous stuff happening on our lands across America is from our own government is definitely as “creepy” as any alien.
Back in the 1970s I saw a very strong beam of light pointing upwards from an open heath area called Thurstaston Common on the Wirral in England. I saw this several times over a period months. I would be traveling from West Kirby to Heswall as a passenger in a taxi around 11:30 pm to 1:00 am, usually on a Friday night. The driver would see it too but always refused to stop to investigate. He was of the opinion that it was to do with witches meeting on the common.
The light was very very bright and was always vertical. It could be seen on good nights and even in heavy rainfall. It was a narrow beam of white, almost blue-white, light. It was as intense as a laser light, but I don’t think there were too many of those around in the mid 70’s and those that were would not have been in the reach of a coven.
What always puzzled me was how anyone could get an energy source up onto the common. I asked around friends who lived close to the common but nobody seemed to have seen this light.
You’ve heard when aliens abduct someone; they float them up a beam of light into their craft. In the Dec. 6, 1997 issue of Science News, an article tells how we’ve duplicated this. Andre Geim, a researcher at the University of Nijmegan in the Netherlands, has levitated frogs with a powerful solenoid magnet. In March of 2000, reports have surfaced from witnesses to cattle abduction. The witnesses stated that they saw live cattle being dragged sideways by an invisible force that made a noise like a giant arc welder. After a few seconds, the cattle were lifted up into the air and vanished out of sight. This was at night and no alien craft could be seen by the witnesses. It sounds like a description of the system the Dutch scientists were testing to levitate living creatures. The alien device was heard beaming massive amounts of electrons into the body of the cow so that it could be lifted into their craft by magnetic force, just like the system the Dutch researchers were working with. The same technique is obviously used by the aliens. I haven’t seen any information that the researchers got their ideas from the aliens. They may have just developed it independently. The aliens have been using the device for thousands of years, employing it primarily in the past to levitate dead soldier’s bodies off of battlefields. I suspect it also could have been used to lift and move large blocks to construct pyramids in ancient times. The next big leap in progress has started. There is more technology that remains to be revealed. If open congressional hearings are ever held, many wonderful advanced products will be forthcoming. The internal combustion engine will be gone in everything from cars to airplanes. Most diseases will be eliminated. The space program will be safer, a lot less expensive, and NASA could openly use the technology the government has already acquired to travel between the stars.
How can the aliens levitate people or cattle onto their ships? Living creatures cannot be magnetized and lifted up into a hovering UFO as abductees claim?
Living creatures can indeed be magnetized and lifted. A world famous scientist has duplicated that capability already. A hundred years ago if you told anyone that machines could think or that men could fly to the Moon, they would think you were crazy. But those things have been done as science has progressed. We have not accepted what the aliens can do using their advanced technology because it seems impossible to us. It is becoming possible. In April 2001 it was announced in the news that astronomers had seen signs of negative gravity (repulsion) in a galaxy 10 billion light years away. Who would have thought that negative gravity was possible? Einstein did. Now it has been discovered in fact. There are so many things that we don’t know. We are progressing slowly. The following article was written by Nobel Prize winning scientist Andrey Geim. He has magnetized living creatures like frogs, and even magnetized drops of water, then lifted them magnetically.
The following is reprinted with the permission of The American Institute of Physics and Andrey Geim. Copyright 1998, American Institute of Physics.
Everyone’s Magnetism
By Andrey Geim
From Physics Today
September 1998
Though it seems counterintuitive, today’s research magnets can easily levitate seemingly nonmagnetic objects, thereby opening an Earthbound door to microgravity conditions. If you were to tell to a child playing with a horseshoe magnet and pieces of iron that his uncle has a much bigger magnet that can lift everything and everybody, the child would probably believe you and might even ask for a ride on the magnet. If a physicist were present at such a conversation, he or she – armed with knowledge and experience – would probably smile condescendingly. The physicist would know well that only a very few materials, such as iron or nickel, are strongly magnetic, while the rest of the world’s materials are not; or to be precise, the rest of the world is a billion (109) times less magnetic. This number seems obviously too large to allow common substances (water, for example) to be lifted even by the most powerful magnets; a billion fold increase in magnetic fields can be found only on neutron stars. In this case, however, knowledge and experience would mislead the physicist: In fact, all materials can be lifted by using magnetic fields that are rather standard these days. In principle, even a child can be levitated by a magnet, as we shall see below.
FIGURE 1: LEVITATING NUTS – EXPERIMENTAL SETUP. The object, in this case a hazelnut (inset), is placed in the 3.2 cm bore of a 20 T Bitter magnet. When the field in the center is about 16 T, the magnet gradients at the levitation point (near the top of the inner coil) are just right to cancel the pull of gravity at the molecular level in this manifestly “nonmagnetic” object. There, the applied field is about 10 T and the nut becomes a weak magnet, having an induced field of about one gauss. This implies a surprisingly large current (about one amp) circulating in the nut’s shell, but the current represents the summation of induced microscopic currents in atoms and is not dissipative. Thus, living creatures are not electrocuted when levitating.
Our twice-cheated intuition
The photographs that accompany this article show a hazelnut (see inset in figure 1, which shows the experimental setup), a frog (figure 2), and a globule of water (figure 3) all hovering, levitating- in a magnetic field of 10 T. This field strength is only several times more than that of existing permanent magnets (about 1.5 T) and only 100 times or so stronger than that of a typical refrigerator magnet. One need just open a textbook on magnetism to realize that such fields can lift “nonmagnetic” materials. Indeed, the magnetic force acting on a material of volume V with susceptibility c in a magnetic field B is F = (MÑ )B where the magnetic moment M =(c /m 0)VB. This force should compensate the gravitational force mg = r Vg (r is the material density and g is the gravitational acceleration) and, hence, the vertical field gradient Ñ B2 required for lifting has to be greater than 2m 0g (r/c) (here we use “lifting” to distinguish it from “levitation,” which means stable floating). Owing to the readjustment of electron orbits in magnetic field, all objects, even “nonmagnetic” ones, exhibit diamagnetism, which determines the lowest possible limit of their magnetic response. Standard handbooks show that, for the great majority of materials, the ratio c /r is close to 10-5 per gram per cubic centimeter. Lifting such materials thus requires a vertical field gradient on the order of 30 T2/cm. Assuming l » 10 cm as the typical size of a high-field solenoid and approximating Ñ B2 » B2/l, one finds that fields of about 10 T are sufficient to lift practically any substance around us. Our intuition is twice cheated: First, we tend to neglect the square increase of the lifting power with magnetic field; second, the magnetic field actually required to lift a piece of iron is just a few gauss, much less than the field in the bulk of a horseshoe magnet. Diamagnetism was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1846, but no one at the time thought that it could lead to any appreciable effects. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), referring to levitation as the problem of “Mohamet’s coffin,” had this to say: “It will probably be impossible ever to observe this phenomenon, on account of the difficulty of getting a magnet strong enough, and a diamagnetic substance sufficiently light, as the [magnetic] forces are excessively feeble.”1 Fields strong enough to lift diamagnetic materials became available during the mid-20th century. In 1939, Werner Braunbeck levitated small beads of graphite in a vertical electromagnet.2 Graphite has the largest ratio c /r known for diamagnetics (8×10-5 cm3/g); today, this experiment can be repeated using just a strong permanent magnet, such as one made of neodymium, iron and boron. Leaving aside superconductors (which are ideal diamagnetics), first levitated by Arkadiev in 1947, it took another fifty years to rediscover the possible levitation of conventional, room temperature materials. In 1991, Eric Beaugnon and Robert Tournier magnetically lifted water and a number of organic substances.3 They were soon followed by others, who levitated liquid hydrogen and helium4 and frog eggs5. At the same time, Jan Kees Maan and I rediscovered diamagnetic levitation at the University of Nijmegen, in collaboration with Humberto Carmona and Peter Main of Nottingham University in England. In our experiments,6 we levitated practically everything at hand, from pieces of cheese and pizza to living creatures including frogs and a mouse. Remarkably, the magnetic fields employed in these experiments had already been available already for several decades and, at perhaps half a dozen laboratories in the world, it would have taken only an hour of work to implement room-temperature levitation. Nevertheless, even physicists who used strong magnetic fields every day in their research did not recognize the possibility. For example, when my colleagues and I first presented photographs of levitating frogs (figure 2) many of our colleagues took them for a hoax, an April fools joke. However counterintuitive the magnetic lifting of seemingly nonmagnetic objects may be, there are more surprises in store for the physicist looking into diamagnetic levitation. Try, for example, to levitate a piece of iron: You will find you can lift it easily with a horseshoe magnet, but you will not be able to float it, whatever tricky configuration of magnets you design. To understand this state of affairs, it is useful to recall Earnshaw’s theorem, which says (as recently reformulated by Michael Berry) that no stationary object made of charges, magnets and masses can be held in space by any fixed combination of electric, magnetic and gravitational forces.6,7 The proof is simple: The stable equilibrium of a test magnet (or charge) in an external field would require its total energy (magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational) to have a minimum; but that is impossible because the energy must satisfy Laplace’s equation, whose solutions have no isolated minima (or maxima), only saddles. Earnshaw’s theorem appears to be so thoroughly forgotten that on many occasions I have been offered schemes that would supposedly allow stable levitation of permanent magnets or paramagnetic substances. The original theorem can be extended to the case of magnetized materials: Paramagnetic substances cannot levitate (unless placed in more strongly paramagnetic media, making them effectively diamagnetic). Only diamagnetic materials can flaunt the rule.1,6 Surprisingly, Kelvin recognized this back in 1847. Just eight years after Samuel Earnshaw put forth his theorem – and showed qualitatively that diamagnetic substances could be stably held in a magnetic field. The theorem fails because diamagnetism, a quantum phenomenon, cannot be approximated by any configuration of classical magnets, as considered in Earnshaw’s theorem. Alternatively, one can say that diamagnetism involves electron motion around nuclei and, therefore, it is not a fixed configuration required by the theorem. Just because an object can levitate does not mean that it will when placed in a strong enough magnetic field. The right conditions are surprisingly subtle; for instance, even an increase of only a few percent in magnetic field will normally destabilize levitation and cause the object to fall. A diamagnetic object can levitate only close to an inflection point of the vertical component of the magnetic field, 6 where d2BZ/dz2 = 0. Note that this is a purely geometrical condition, which does not depend on the field strength. The spatial extent of the region of stable levitation is typically a small fraction of the magnet’s size – just 2 centimeters for our half-meter Bitter magnet, for example. Accordingly, the field strength must be carefully adjusted to compensate for gravity at that particular point. If the field is slightly weaker than required, the object falls; if stronger, the field is horizontally unstable and only the magnet walls stop the object from moving sideways and then falling. A gentle touch or airflow can easily destroy the levitation. Those who have tried to levitate high-temperature superconductors would probably raise their eyebrows, adjustments of both spatial position and field strength are required since they encounter no problems. However, superconducting levitation takes advantage of magnetic flux lines being pinned inside a superconductor; this is what makes floating superconductors such a familiar sight. Eliminate pinning, and once again careful adjustments of both spatial position and field strength are required.
Unique features, exciting uses
The idea of diamagnetic levitation is so attractive that, when first learning about it, experimental physicists naturally start thinking – if only for a brief moment – about employing the effect in their particular research. Indeed, superconducting magnets with a room-temperature bore are relatively cheap these days, -a reasonable, basic setup costs about $ 100,000. – making access to the levitation affordable even for individual research groups. With respect to possible applications, some features of diamagnetic levitation are really unique. First of all, such levitation provides a frictionless suspension whose parameters (such as rigidity) can be controlled at will by adjusting the field profile. This feature makes it possible to design, for example ultra-sensitive gravimeters and other geophysical equipment where sensitivity to minor variations in the gravitational field is required. Along with the basic simplicity and flexibility of such instruments, the absence of flux jumps and the possibility of incorporating optical detection schemes make them an attractive alternative to devices based on superconducting levitation.8 The most distinctive advantage of room-temperature diamagnetic levitation, however, is that – unlike any other known or feasible technique including superconducting levitation 9- the suspension is distributed uniformly over the bulk. In fact, for a homogeneous material in a field with profile B2 µ z, gravity is canceled on the level of individual atoms and molecules, which makes it possible to closely simulate microgravity conditions right here on Earth. One should bare in mind that this is still not an ideal weightlessness: Deviations are present due to (1) an unavoidable field gradient in the horizontal direction (because Ñ B=0), (2) a distortion of the field by the presence of a magnetized object (on the order of m , or 10-5) and (3) a possible anisotropy of the diamagnetic susceptibility. Nevertheless, for a multitude of applications, the simplicity and accessibility of such ground-based “space” research outweighs the possible complications associated with these relatively small corrections. After all, the simulated microgravity is as close as we can – probably ever – approach science fiction’s antigravity machine. Watching a levitating water drop in a magnet (as in figure 3), one inevitably starts thinking about studying weightless fluid dynamics, not on board a space shuttle10 but simply in a laboratory. Containerless crystal growth, also a frequent subject of space
FIGURE 2: A FREE-FLOATING FROG, in the bore of a 20 T magnet, as in figure 1. Other than the disorientation that comes with weightlessness, the frog – or indeed any living organism – seems to suffer no adverse effects from exposure to such field strengths, as discussed in the text.
research, is another obvious application to consider. Or take, for example, diamagnetically suspended gyroscopes. In our own recent experiment, we could observe Earth’s rotation using a small plastic ball levitated in a-magnet and spun by a laser beam. Not a great achievement in itself, but already our first attempt has shown error drifts of just 0.1% of Earth’s rotation, a record low for any type of gyroscope.
WEIGHTLESS FLUID DYNAMICS is one area in which research might exploit magnetic levitation. Magnetic microgravity seems to work well even for complex biological systems. Several groups of biophysicists, – such as those led by James Valles of Brown University, Karl Hasenstein of the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Markus Braun of the University of Bonn (Germany) , have already begun studies of plant and animal responses to such magnetically simulated microgravity. Biological systems are astonishingly homogeneous with respect to diamagnetic levitation: Seemingly diverse components such as water, tissues, bones and blood differ in their values of c /r by only several percent,11 which implies that gravity is compensated to better than 0.1g throughout a complex living organism. Further, even if paramagnetic molecules and ions are present, as in blood, they contribute only to the average susceptibility; their strong response to the field is smeared out by temperature (mBB << kT), Brownian motion and a much stronger coupling to the surrounding diamagnetic molecules.11 Probably, the alignment of very long biomolecules along the field direction is the magnetic effect most likely to obscure true microgravity in complex systems.12 Fortunately, one can always check for this and other nonmicrogravity effects by placing a system in an identical, but horizontal, field gradient or in a homogeneous field of the same intensity. An interesting example of how the diamagnetic force can be exploited is an attempt to show that in space a magnetic field can replace gravity as a guide for plant growth: A germinating seed needs to know in which direction to grow so that it can successfully emerge from the soil before its limited resources are exhausted. Hasenstein’s ground-based experiments13 indicate that even a small permanent magnet can provide enough guidance for a growing plant on board of a spaceship.
As for possible, and as yet unknown, adverse effects of strong a 4constant magnetic fields on living systems (a subject of interest on its own), such effects are unlikely to be strong. In researching medical applications, volunteers have spent up to 40 hours inside Tesla whole-body magnet without any obvious ill effects11 and further similar experiments currently under way at Ohio State University also indicate no danger at least up to 8 T, according to John Schenck from the General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center, in Schenectady, New York. So, when the researchers from Brown University found an abnormal development of frog embryos in artificial microgravity, they probably rightly attributed it to the influence of weightlessness rather than to the magnetic field.
Finally, let us return to the child who wanted to levitate. However provocative, it is instructive to discuss this possibility: After all, the leader of a religious sect in England offered 1 million pounds for a machine to levitate him in front of his congregation.14 The magnetic field required to keep a uniform value of ÑB2 increases with volume. The existing Bitter and superconducting magnets are capable of levitating objects a few centimeters in diameter. According to magnet designers from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, existing technology can accommodate objects up to about 15 cm. However, levitating a human would require a special racetrack magnet of almost 40 Tesla and about one GW of continuous power consumption. So, while the use of diamagnetic levitation is bound to become increasingly popular among scientists, the child and the priest will perhaps have to use less impressive but more conventional methods of levitation like a helicopter.
REFERENCES
1. W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Reprints of Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism, London, MacMillan (1872)
2. W. Braunbeck, Z. Phys. 112, 735 (1939).
3. E. Beaugnon , R.Tournier, Nature 349, 470 (1991); J. Phys. III (France) 1, 1423 (1991).
4. M.A.Weilert, D.L.Whitaker, H.J.Maris, G.M.Seidel, Phys.Rev. Lett. 77, 4840 (1996).
5. J.M.Valles, K. Lin, J.M. Denegre and K.L. Mowry, Biophys. J. 73, 1130 (1997).
6. M.V.Berry , A.K.Geim, Eur. J. Phys. 18, 307 (1997).
7. T.B. Jones, J.App.Phys. 50, 5057 (1979).
8. D.E.Smylie, Science 255, 1678 (1992).
9. E.H. Brandt, Science 243, 349 (1989).
10. R.E.Apfel et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1912 (1997).
11. J.F. Schenck, Annals NY Acad. Sci. 649, 285 (1992).
12. For a review, see G. Maret, Physica B 164, 205 (1990).
Check out all the pages on the site. I wrote the site like a tabloid newspaper to impress on readers an outline of what has been going on throughout history.
WARNING reveals a frightening alien agenda, a long-term program of social domination and periodic controlled genocide. Mankind is now in great danger. We have a terrible problem to overcome. Resolution requires international solidarity, then forcible negotiation with the aliens.
Mar 10 2010 
March 12th, 2010 at 6:52 am
Back in the 1970s I saw a very strong beam of light pointing upwards from an open heath area called Thurstaston Common on the Wirral in England. I saw this several times over a period months. I would be traveling from West Kirby to Heswall as a passenger in a taxi around 11:30 pm to 1:00 am, usually on a Friday night. The driver would see it too but always refused to stop to investigate. He was of the opinion that it was to do with witches meeting on the common.
The light was very very bright and was always vertical. It could be seen on good nights and even in heavy rainfall. It was a narrow beam of white, almost blue-white, light. It was as intense as a laser light, but I don’t think there were too many of those around in the mid 70’s and those that were would not have been in the reach of a coven.
What always puzzled me was how anyone could get an energy source up onto the common. I asked around friends who lived close to the common but nobody seemed to have seen this light.
March 15th, 2010 at 12:02 am
You’ve heard when aliens abduct someone; they float them up a beam of light into their craft. In the Dec. 6, 1997 issue of Science News, an article tells how we’ve duplicated this. Andre Geim, a researcher at the University of Nijmegan in the Netherlands, has levitated frogs with a powerful solenoid magnet. In March of 2000, reports have surfaced from witnesses to cattle abduction. The witnesses stated that they saw live cattle being dragged sideways by an invisible force that made a noise like a giant arc welder. After a few seconds, the cattle were lifted up into the air and vanished out of sight. This was at night and no alien craft could be seen by the witnesses. It sounds like a description of the system the Dutch scientists were testing to levitate living creatures. The alien device was heard beaming massive amounts of electrons into the body of the cow so that it could be lifted into their craft by magnetic force, just like the system the Dutch researchers were working with. The same technique is obviously used by the aliens. I haven’t seen any information that the researchers got their ideas from the aliens. They may have just developed it independently. The aliens have been using the device for thousands of years, employing it primarily in the past to levitate dead soldier’s bodies off of battlefields. I suspect it also could have been used to lift and move large blocks to construct pyramids in ancient times. The next big leap in progress has started. There is more technology that remains to be revealed. If open congressional hearings are ever held, many wonderful advanced products will be forthcoming. The internal combustion engine will be gone in everything from cars to airplanes. Most diseases will be eliminated. The space program will be safer, a lot less expensive, and NASA could openly use the technology the government has already acquired to travel between the stars.
How can the aliens levitate people or cattle onto their ships? Living creatures cannot be magnetized and lifted up into a hovering UFO as abductees claim?
Living creatures can indeed be magnetized and lifted. A world famous scientist has duplicated that capability already. A hundred years ago if you told anyone that machines could think or that men could fly to the Moon, they would think you were crazy. But those things have been done as science has progressed. We have not accepted what the aliens can do using their advanced technology because it seems impossible to us. It is becoming possible. In April 2001 it was announced in the news that astronomers had seen signs of negative gravity (repulsion) in a galaxy 10 billion light years away. Who would have thought that negative gravity was possible? Einstein did. Now it has been discovered in fact. There are so many things that we don’t know. We are progressing slowly. The following article was written by Nobel Prize winning scientist Andrey Geim. He has magnetized living creatures like frogs, and even magnetized drops of water, then lifted them magnetically.
The following is reprinted with the permission of The American Institute of Physics and Andrey Geim. Copyright 1998, American Institute of Physics.
Everyone’s Magnetism
By Andrey Geim
From Physics Today
September 1998
Though it seems counterintuitive, today’s research magnets can easily levitate seemingly nonmagnetic objects, thereby opening an Earthbound door to microgravity conditions. If you were to tell to a child playing with a horseshoe magnet and pieces of iron that his uncle has a much bigger magnet that can lift everything and everybody, the child would probably believe you and might even ask for a ride on the magnet. If a physicist were present at such a conversation, he or she – armed with knowledge and experience – would probably smile condescendingly. The physicist would know well that only a very few materials, such as iron or nickel, are strongly magnetic, while the rest of the world’s materials are not; or to be precise, the rest of the world is a billion (109) times less magnetic. This number seems obviously too large to allow common substances (water, for example) to be lifted even by the most powerful magnets; a billion fold increase in magnetic fields can be found only on neutron stars. In this case, however, knowledge and experience would mislead the physicist: In fact, all materials can be lifted by using magnetic fields that are rather standard these days. In principle, even a child can be levitated by a magnet, as we shall see below.
Images.
FIGURE 1: LEVITATING NUTS – EXPERIMENTAL SETUP. The object, in this case a hazelnut (inset), is placed in the 3.2 cm bore of a 20 T Bitter magnet. When the field in the center is about 16 T, the magnet gradients at the levitation point (near the top of the inner coil) are just right to cancel the pull of gravity at the molecular level in this manifestly “nonmagnetic” object. There, the applied field is about 10 T and the nut becomes a weak magnet, having an induced field of about one gauss. This implies a surprisingly large current (about one amp) circulating in the nut’s shell, but the current represents the summation of induced microscopic currents in atoms and is not dissipative. Thus, living creatures are not electrocuted when levitating.
Our twice-cheated intuition
The photographs that accompany this article show a hazelnut (see inset in figure 1, which shows the experimental setup), a frog (figure 2), and a globule of water (figure 3) all hovering, levitating- in a magnetic field of 10 T. This field strength is only several times more than that of existing permanent magnets (about 1.5 T) and only 100 times or so stronger than that of a typical refrigerator magnet. One need just open a textbook on magnetism to realize that such fields can lift “nonmagnetic” materials. Indeed, the magnetic force acting on a material of volume V with susceptibility c in a magnetic field B is F = (MÑ )B where the magnetic moment M =(c /m 0)VB. This force should compensate the gravitational force mg = r Vg (r is the material density and g is the gravitational acceleration) and, hence, the vertical field gradient Ñ B2 required for lifting has to be greater than 2m 0g (r/c) (here we use “lifting” to distinguish it from “levitation,” which means stable floating). Owing to the readjustment of electron orbits in magnetic field, all objects, even “nonmagnetic” ones, exhibit diamagnetism, which determines the lowest possible limit of their magnetic response. Standard handbooks show that, for the great majority of materials, the ratio c /r is close to 10-5 per gram per cubic centimeter. Lifting such materials thus requires a vertical field gradient on the order of 30 T2/cm. Assuming l » 10 cm as the typical size of a high-field solenoid and approximating Ñ B2 » B2/l, one finds that fields of about 10 T are sufficient to lift practically any substance around us. Our intuition is twice cheated: First, we tend to neglect the square increase of the lifting power with magnetic field; second, the magnetic field actually required to lift a piece of iron is just a few gauss, much less than the field in the bulk of a horseshoe magnet. Diamagnetism was discovered by Michael Faraday in 1846, but no one at the time thought that it could lead to any appreciable effects. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), referring to levitation as the problem of “Mohamet’s coffin,” had this to say: “It will probably be impossible ever to observe this phenomenon, on account of the difficulty of getting a magnet strong enough, and a diamagnetic substance sufficiently light, as the [magnetic] forces are excessively feeble.”1 Fields strong enough to lift diamagnetic materials became available during the mid-20th century. In 1939, Werner Braunbeck levitated small beads of graphite in a vertical electromagnet.2 Graphite has the largest ratio c /r known for diamagnetics (8×10-5 cm3/g); today, this experiment can be repeated using just a strong permanent magnet, such as one made of neodymium, iron and boron. Leaving aside superconductors (which are ideal diamagnetics), first levitated by Arkadiev in 1947, it took another fifty years to rediscover the possible levitation of conventional, room temperature materials. In 1991, Eric Beaugnon and Robert Tournier magnetically lifted water and a number of organic substances.3 They were soon followed by others, who levitated liquid hydrogen and helium4 and frog eggs5. At the same time, Jan Kees Maan and I rediscovered diamagnetic levitation at the University of Nijmegen, in collaboration with Humberto Carmona and Peter Main of Nottingham University in England. In our experiments,6 we levitated practically everything at hand, from pieces of cheese and pizza to living creatures including frogs and a mouse. Remarkably, the magnetic fields employed in these experiments had already been available already for several decades and, at perhaps half a dozen laboratories in the world, it would have taken only an hour of work to implement room-temperature levitation. Nevertheless, even physicists who used strong magnetic fields every day in their research did not recognize the possibility. For example, when my colleagues and I first presented photographs of levitating frogs (figure 2) many of our colleagues took them for a hoax, an April fools joke. However counterintuitive the magnetic lifting of seemingly nonmagnetic objects may be, there are more surprises in store for the physicist looking into diamagnetic levitation. Try, for example, to levitate a piece of iron: You will find you can lift it easily with a horseshoe magnet, but you will not be able to float it, whatever tricky configuration of magnets you design. To understand this state of affairs, it is useful to recall Earnshaw’s theorem, which says (as recently reformulated by Michael Berry) that no stationary object made of charges, magnets and masses can be held in space by any fixed combination of electric, magnetic and gravitational forces.6,7 The proof is simple: The stable equilibrium of a test magnet (or charge) in an external field would require its total energy (magnetic, electrostatic and gravitational) to have a minimum; but that is impossible because the energy must satisfy Laplace’s equation, whose solutions have no isolated minima (or maxima), only saddles. Earnshaw’s theorem appears to be so thoroughly forgotten that on many occasions I have been offered schemes that would supposedly allow stable levitation of permanent magnets or paramagnetic substances. The original theorem can be extended to the case of magnetized materials: Paramagnetic substances cannot levitate (unless placed in more strongly paramagnetic media, making them effectively diamagnetic). Only diamagnetic materials can flaunt the rule.1,6 Surprisingly, Kelvin recognized this back in 1847. Just eight years after Samuel Earnshaw put forth his theorem – and showed qualitatively that diamagnetic substances could be stably held in a magnetic field. The theorem fails because diamagnetism, a quantum phenomenon, cannot be approximated by any configuration of classical magnets, as considered in Earnshaw’s theorem. Alternatively, one can say that diamagnetism involves electron motion around nuclei and, therefore, it is not a fixed configuration required by the theorem. Just because an object can levitate does not mean that it will when placed in a strong enough magnetic field. The right conditions are surprisingly subtle; for instance, even an increase of only a few percent in magnetic field will normally destabilize levitation and cause the object to fall. A diamagnetic object can levitate only close to an inflection point of the vertical component of the magnetic field, 6 where d2BZ/dz2 = 0. Note that this is a purely geometrical condition, which does not depend on the field strength. The spatial extent of the region of stable levitation is typically a small fraction of the magnet’s size – just 2 centimeters for our half-meter Bitter magnet, for example. Accordingly, the field strength must be carefully adjusted to compensate for gravity at that particular point. If the field is slightly weaker than required, the object falls; if stronger, the field is horizontally unstable and only the magnet walls stop the object from moving sideways and then falling. A gentle touch or airflow can easily destroy the levitation. Those who have tried to levitate high-temperature superconductors would probably raise their eyebrows, adjustments of both spatial position and field strength are required since they encounter no problems. However, superconducting levitation takes advantage of magnetic flux lines being pinned inside a superconductor; this is what makes floating superconductors such a familiar sight. Eliminate pinning, and once again careful adjustments of both spatial position and field strength are required.
Unique features, exciting uses
The idea of diamagnetic levitation is so attractive that, when first learning about it, experimental physicists naturally start thinking – if only for a brief moment – about employing the effect in their particular research. Indeed, superconducting magnets with a room-temperature bore are relatively cheap these days, -a reasonable, basic setup costs about $ 100,000. – making access to the levitation affordable even for individual research groups. With respect to possible applications, some features of diamagnetic levitation are really unique. First of all, such levitation provides a frictionless suspension whose parameters (such as rigidity) can be controlled at will by adjusting the field profile. This feature makes it possible to design, for example ultra-sensitive gravimeters and other geophysical equipment where sensitivity to minor variations in the gravitational field is required. Along with the basic simplicity and flexibility of such instruments, the absence of flux jumps and the possibility of incorporating optical detection schemes make them an attractive alternative to devices based on superconducting levitation.8 The most distinctive advantage of room-temperature diamagnetic levitation, however, is that – unlike any other known or feasible technique including superconducting levitation 9- the suspension is distributed uniformly over the bulk. In fact, for a homogeneous material in a field with profile B2 µ z, gravity is canceled on the level of individual atoms and molecules, which makes it possible to closely simulate microgravity conditions right here on Earth. One should bare in mind that this is still not an ideal weightlessness: Deviations are present due to (1) an unavoidable field gradient in the horizontal direction (because Ñ B=0), (2) a distortion of the field by the presence of a magnetized object (on the order of m , or 10-5) and (3) a possible anisotropy of the diamagnetic susceptibility. Nevertheless, for a multitude of applications, the simplicity and accessibility of such ground-based “space” research outweighs the possible complications associated with these relatively small corrections. After all, the simulated microgravity is as close as we can – probably ever – approach science fiction’s antigravity machine. Watching a levitating water drop in a magnet (as in figure 3), one inevitably starts thinking about studying weightless fluid dynamics, not on board a space shuttle10 but simply in a laboratory. Containerless crystal growth, also a frequent subject of space
FIGURE 2: A FREE-FLOATING FROG, in the bore of a 20 T magnet, as in figure 1. Other than the disorientation that comes with weightlessness, the frog – or indeed any living organism – seems to suffer no adverse effects from exposure to such field strengths, as discussed in the text.
research, is another obvious application to consider. Or take, for example, diamagnetically suspended gyroscopes. In our own recent experiment, we could observe Earth’s rotation using a small plastic ball levitated in a-magnet and spun by a laser beam. Not a great achievement in itself, but already our first attempt has shown error drifts of just 0.1% of Earth’s rotation, a record low for any type of gyroscope.
WEIGHTLESS FLUID DYNAMICS is one area in which research might exploit magnetic levitation. Magnetic microgravity seems to work well even for complex biological systems. Several groups of biophysicists, – such as those led by James Valles of Brown University, Karl Hasenstein of the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Markus Braun of the University of Bonn (Germany) , have already begun studies of plant and animal responses to such magnetically simulated microgravity. Biological systems are astonishingly homogeneous with respect to diamagnetic levitation: Seemingly diverse components such as water, tissues, bones and blood differ in their values of c /r by only several percent,11 which implies that gravity is compensated to better than 0.1g throughout a complex living organism. Further, even if paramagnetic molecules and ions are present, as in blood, they contribute only to the average susceptibility; their strong response to the field is smeared out by temperature (mBB << kT), Brownian motion and a much stronger coupling to the surrounding diamagnetic molecules.11 Probably, the alignment of very long biomolecules along the field direction is the magnetic effect most likely to obscure true microgravity in complex systems.12 Fortunately, one can always check for this and other nonmicrogravity effects by placing a system in an identical, but horizontal, field gradient or in a homogeneous field of the same intensity. An interesting example of how the diamagnetic force can be exploited is an attempt to show that in space a magnetic field can replace gravity as a guide for plant growth: A germinating seed needs to know in which direction to grow so that it can successfully emerge from the soil before its limited resources are exhausted. Hasenstein’s ground-based experiments13 indicate that even a small permanent magnet can provide enough guidance for a growing plant on board of a spaceship.
As for possible, and as yet unknown, adverse effects of strong a 4constant magnetic fields on living systems (a subject of interest on its own), such effects are unlikely to be strong. In researching medical applications, volunteers have spent up to 40 hours inside Tesla whole-body magnet without any obvious ill effects11 and further similar experiments currently under way at Ohio State University also indicate no danger at least up to 8 T, according to John Schenck from the General Electric Corporate Research and Development Center, in Schenectady, New York. So, when the researchers from Brown University found an abnormal development of frog embryos in artificial microgravity, they probably rightly attributed it to the influence of weightlessness rather than to the magnetic field.
Finally, let us return to the child who wanted to levitate. However provocative, it is instructive to discuss this possibility: After all, the leader of a religious sect in England offered 1 million pounds for a machine to levitate him in front of his congregation.14 The magnetic field required to keep a uniform value of ÑB2 increases with volume. The existing Bitter and superconducting magnets are capable of levitating objects a few centimeters in diameter. According to magnet designers from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida, existing technology can accommodate objects up to about 15 cm. However, levitating a human would require a special racetrack magnet of almost 40 Tesla and about one GW of continuous power consumption. So, while the use of diamagnetic levitation is bound to become increasingly popular among scientists, the child and the priest will perhaps have to use less impressive but more conventional methods of levitation like a helicopter.
REFERENCES
1. W. Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Reprints of Papers on Electrostatics and Magnetism, London, MacMillan (1872)
2. W. Braunbeck, Z. Phys. 112, 735 (1939).
3. E. Beaugnon , R.Tournier, Nature 349, 470 (1991); J. Phys. III (France) 1, 1423 (1991).
4. M.A.Weilert, D.L.Whitaker, H.J.Maris, G.M.Seidel, Phys.Rev. Lett. 77, 4840 (1996).
5. J.M.Valles, K. Lin, J.M. Denegre and K.L. Mowry, Biophys. J. 73, 1130 (1997).
6. M.V.Berry , A.K.Geim, Eur. J. Phys. 18, 307 (1997).
7. T.B. Jones, J.App.Phys. 50, 5057 (1979).
8. D.E.Smylie, Science 255, 1678 (1992).
9. E.H. Brandt, Science 243, 349 (1989).
10. R.E.Apfel et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1912 (1997).
11. J.F. Schenck, Annals NY Acad. Sci. 649, 285 (1992).
12. For a review, see G. Maret, Physica B 164, 205 (1990).
The above is excerpted from:
“Warning” by Art Greenfield
ISBN: 1-59113-358-0
Copyright © 2005 by Art Greenfield
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WARNING reveals a frightening alien agenda, a long-term program of social domination and periodic controlled genocide. Mankind is now in great danger. We have a terrible problem to overcome. Resolution requires international solidarity, then forcible negotiation with the aliens.
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