Building a Baby Earth to Test Its Magnetic Field

Ah, the Magratheans are back!

mark it.

Compass is invented by our chinese.

"Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning."

The article suggest sodium metal, Na, but a eutectic alloy of 56 Na : 44 K would have a lower melting point.

The Earths center is not liquid it is solid, but the outer center core is a semi-liqid!!!

Spencer.

No one else will say it so I will - what a cool project!

It's a very expensive toy, and I wonder if the long-suffering taxpayer coughed up, once again for that plaything.

<"....Researcher Dan Lathrop says, no matter how it turns out, his experiment will shed light on how real planets' magnetic fields work.....">

I have a shed light they could have had for free.

as far as magnetism goes, nobody really knows what it really is, or how it is really made, it's just theory.

So I guess we could call the followers of it: "Magnetic Theory People".

Kind Regards....

This may turn out to be one of the most important fields (no pun intended) of research in our time. When the first experiment to measure the earth's magnetic field (in 1855) was repeated a century later (in 1955), the field was found to have declined by 10%. Experimental error was not sufficient to account for the difference. The north magnetic pole which had long been in the Boothia peninsula in Canada has started moving to the northwest by about 40 km per year so it has now cleared to the west of the Canadian arctic islands.

The reduction of the field permits more charged particles from solar flares to reach the earth rather than be trapped in the van Allen belts. The enormous energy from deceleration of the particles from 1000 miles per second (26 hours from the sun to the earth) is currently heating the polar regions but not the rest of the world, so unless global warming does not proceed in parallel, all lowlands will be flooded. (Global warming will increase equatorial evaporation to balance the extra water melted from polar ice caps.)

Whne volcanic activity blanketed the earth in 7000 ppm of CO2, the temperature went up 6 C, enough to get the world out of the ice age. On nine occasions in the past when the magnetic field of the earth reversed, there was a surge to 20 C above normal followed by a discontinuity to 20 C below normal. The change from the 280 ppm CO2 200 years ago to the current 380 ppm CO2 is negligible in terms of warming, so do not believe the global warming hoax that is designed to fuel tax-grab initiatives like the Kyoto accord. The real threat is loss of the magnetic field.