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March 30, 2004
Levitating Frogs
Okay, so I guess I need to start getting more than just 5-6 hours of sleep at least once in awhile. I'm currently on a streak of over a week of not getting any more than that in a night, and I'm startin' to feel it. Take, for instance, this morning in Adv Math Methods at 8am. Now granted, it's usually hard for me (or anyone) to stay fully alert in that class on any given day, but today was particularly bad. I caught myself on several occasions writing gibberish in my notebook instead of what Prof Mellema was writing on the board. That's how tired I was. Not good. I haven't written tired gibberish in my notebook since last spring when John & I had to pull an all-nighter to work on a formal lab for Electronics. Man, my notes that day from Modern Physics and Accelrated Logic were really funny, hehe. For example, in Modern I labeled some graph's axis as "Tucker." Don't ask me why, because I have absolutely no idea what was going through my head at that point. Thank goodness today wasn't nearly as bad as that, hehe.
Tonight there was a Sigma Xi talk in Olin 103 by a professor from Florida State University, on diamagnetism and levitating frogs. It was really interesting, and one of the best physics talks I've been to in my time here. Apparently Florida State has the world's top research lab for magnetism, with large superconducting and resistive magnets that are capable of producing magnetic fields as large as 45 Tesla. That's ginormous! The currents that they use to generate magnetic fields that powerful are on the order of 60,000 Amps. I believe he said that they were able to make frogs levitate using diamagnetic (as opposed to the better known ferromagnetic and paramagnetic) fields of around 33 Tesla. (FYI for non-physics people: the earth's magnetic field is about 0.5 Tesla, and anything above 5 Tesla is considered a very strong magnetic field.)
Well, time for me to get some sleep for a change.
Posted by Jared at March 30, 2004 11:49 PM