John Cuthber Posted December 15, 2009 Posted December 15, 2009 I have always wanted a half decent excuse to ask this. How long is a piece of string? Actually I tend to agree with emcellhannon I blame the skewer. Are you in a position to repeat this with, for example, a pencil?
hermanntrude Posted December 19, 2009 Author Posted December 19, 2009 the skewer was wooden, and the crystals were deliberately chosen to be at least close to the same size.
emcelhannon Posted December 28, 2009 Posted December 28, 2009 How about this. The unattractive piece from the edge was contaminated by loose ferrous material from the pot, while the pretty crystal formed more to the center of the ingot, away from contaminants. or This give new meaning to Charles Dirrac's comment that it's "more important for the equation to be beautiful than for it to fit experiment."
hermanntrude Posted December 29, 2009 Author Posted December 29, 2009 This was a new stainless steel container. I doubt anything was loose on it. I suspect that both para- and dia-magnetism are more complex than usually taught. I suspect that core electrons (most of the ones which are paired) ALWAYS display some diamagnetism, which in many cases cancels out the paramagnetism of the ocassional unpaired electrons in the valence shell. the exceptions, of course would be elements which had very few core electrons, so the diamagnetic effect wouldn't be enough to counteract the paramagnetic one. These elements would correlate nicely to the ones we usually restrict ourselves to in simple chemistry courses (the first three periods). This is just a hypothesis, of course, but I DID read somewhere that ALL substances are diamagnetic to some extent.
Robin Hood Posted December 29, 2009 Posted December 29, 2009 Our Bismuth Video... deals with the radioactivity question especially...
hermanntrude Posted January 2, 2010 Author Posted January 2, 2010 i've seen all your video's. I appreciate them and enjoy them immensely. However, I don't recall that particular video explaining the effect I've observed above. By the way I have recently repeated the experiment using a ceramic crucible instead of a metal one to check the ferrous metal hypothesis mentioned above. The results are the same.
emcelhannon Posted June 12, 2012 Posted June 12, 2012 I thought I'd post this here. I'm pleased with the results. https://www.etsy.com/listing/98130033/fathers-day-gift-express-shipping
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