- I'm trying to bend water with a magnet.

This paper did it, which is incredible.

It came out in March of this year, and they used some pretty standard neodymium magnets to move and deflect a one-millimeter stream of water about 1/4 to 1/2 a millimeter, and they measured it using some really sensitive, fancy .. I don't have that kind of fancy detection equipment, so I wanna try and go bigger.

(upbeat music) If I just discovered something new, I don't wanna have just discovered something new.

I don't wanna write a paper.

I'm not like George.

I've already been published, and I didn't like the experience.

Step one is doing this the easy way.

This is a pretty standard, maybe physics demo that's done with either a balloon or a comb.

(balloon squeaking) Now, as George recently talked about, static electricity is complicated, but I can concentrate it in one place by rubbing a balloon against my hair.

Water molecules are polar with a slight positive charge on one end and a slight negative charge on the other end.

Okay, fantastic.

So I can use that built-up static electricity to move the stream of water.

Whoa.

(laughs) That's so cool.

Oh my gosh.

You can actually see the stream of.. bend towards the balloon a little bit.

With the magnets, I wanna deflect the water away.

I didn't expect that to be as instantly cool as it was.

That's so fun.

Ah, oh my gosh.

Oh my.

Magnets are all about unpaired electrons.

If you have paired electrons in an atom, one spins up and one spins down, and they cancel each other out.

But if you have an unpaired electron, there's only spin in one direction, and that creates a small magnetic field.

If those tiny magnetic fields start to align in a material, you can start to get magnetic domains.

And if you get a bunch of magnetic domains that all align in a material, you can get a magnet.

Now, if you bring that magnet close to another material with unpaired electrons, you can start to align their magnetic domains as well and attract them.

Magnets, paperclips, science.

Now, these paperclips on their own are not magnetic, but if I run a magnet over one, I can start to actually align all of those unpaired electrons within it and turn that paperclip into its own little magnet that I can then use, ah, to pick up another paperclip.

They're little fish, and it's like the two fish are kissing.

How cute.

You can also align magnetic fields.. by whacking it with a hammer.

(hammer thuds) Oh my god.

(hammer thudding) So sorry to my neighbors.

(hammer thudding) So it works best if you hold your piece of iron-containing metal in a north to south configuration, and then just bap it on the south end.

(hammer thudding) And I'm physically shaking those electron spins into alignment right now, and this creates a very weak magnet.

But there is just a gentle magnetic field around the edges here that I can pick up now with my Tesla meter.

Can I pick up fish?

(gasps) Oh my God, look at that.

It worked.

Okay, it's the lightest magnet.

It's a gentle magnet.

(chuckles) I made a weak, gentle magnet.

So I should be able to use that magnetic force to move water, and this is my first real attempt t.. So I have a little Eppendorf tube full of just distilled water, and I've put it onto this little styrofoam boat so that I can float it on a bigger body of water.

And now I can take my neodymium magnets and I can try and push this little boat away.

And it's subtle, but it does work.

I am not touching this tube of water, and, okay, well, that time I actually touched the boat.

But no matter which pole of my stack of magnets I use, I can move this little Eppendorf tube away.

It turns out that water is diamagnetic.

If something is ferromagnetic, it means that it is strongly attracted to both poles of a magnet.

If it's paramagnetic, that means that it's weakly attracted to both poles of a magnet.

And if it's diamagnetic, that means that it is weakly repelled from the poles of a magnet.

Iron is ferromagnetic, aluminum is paramagnetic, and water is diamagnetic.

And this did not make intrinsic sense to me because all of the electrons and water molecules are paired.

But it turns out that when the electrons of a water molecule are placed inside of magnetic field, it actually shifts the paths of those electrons a little bit.

So if you place water into a positive magnetic field, it will create its own small, slightly positive m.. and the two will repel.

The reason why is quantum mechanics, and there's a better explanation than that, but I've got stuff to do.

I gotta bend some water here.

So in this paper, they used a stack of magnets that had a force of about 0.63 Teslas.

But some medical MRI machines which can drag people across rooms also have a strength of about 0.5 to 1 Teslas.

So why is this not dragging me across the room?

This really tripped me up for a minute.

And it turns out it's not just the strength of the f.. but also the size of the field.

And that is determined in part by the size of the magnet.

And that magnetic field decreases the farther you get away from that magnet at a rate of one over the radius cubed.

So I want a strong field, but my magnets are tiny, so I'm gonna get them as close to that stream as I can.

That way, I'm really using the strongest part of that magnetic field to try and deflect the stream.

I have my setup.

I have my burette, I've put a little bit of Parafilm on the top, and I poked a small hole in it to try and slightly slow down the rate at which the water's flowing through.

I can slightly replicate the effect by moving magnets in different configurations towards the stream of water as it's running.

The problem is that it's weak.

It's very weak.

It is hard for me to see when I'm looking at it.

I mean, this is cool.

This is cool to be able to see it shift, but it's small.

It's small.

But I still wanted to go bigger, and I wanted to go bigger safely, and with things that I could purchase that weren't thousands of dollars.

You can get one Tesla neodymium magnet if you wanna spend close to $2,000.

I don't.

So instead, I wanted to try and cons.. You carefully orient small permanent magnets such that their magnetic fields add together on one side of the magnetic array and subtract out on the other side of the magnetic array.

This is why your fridge magnets only stick in one direction to your fridge.

The problem with constructing a DIY Halbach array.

It smells like my dad working on model airplanes as a kid.

Is that the magnets wanting to fly out of it.

Mm, no, no, don't twist.

That's not what I want.

All right, I ended up having to put m.. in the vice as it dries, because the two plates were starting to push away from each other.

But then I remember that my vice is met.. so we'll see if I can get this outta here later.

But it's definitely more stuck to one side of the vice than the other.

So it's working.

I did end up constructing a Halbach array, but it was really short-lived.

I was only able to try it out, like, once or twice before it kind of sprang itself apart.

These can be kind of dangerous.

Using neodymium magnets, you can pinch your fingers, which I did.

(device whirring) It is working, but like, (sighs) it's not dramatic.

It was not that much more impressive than what I got just with my own stack of neodymium magnets.

So it was a cool thing to try, and it was kind of neat to put together, it was sort of a fun engineering project, but it didn't let me go as big as I wanted to go.

So I am going to set up my system from before, but this time with the heavy water.

This is the heavy water test.

I feel like I actually can see visually a difference.

It almost looks like it's curving towar.. Is it moving towards it?

What is happening?

Okay, I gotta watch this back.

I watched it again, and yeah, it is definitely moving towards the magnet rather than away from the magnet.

Heavy water has a different mass than regular water, so the mass to magnetic dipole moment ratio is going to be different.

So it makes sense that it's responding differently to the magnet, but why is it moving towards the magnet?

But then I did the experiment again, and now it is moving away from the magnet.

I am confused.

I do not understand what is going on.

(stutters) Have I just discovered something new?

I don't want to have just discovered something new.

I don't wanna write a paper.

I'm not like George.

I've already been published, and I didn't like the experience.

Why?

Why is this happening?

Do I have to write a paper about this now?