Neodymium Magnet Dodecahedron
It took 10 tries before I finally built this giant dodecahedron. It kept collapsing under its own weight.
It is easy to build small magnetic sculptures, but when building something large, it becomes more difficult because magnets are heavy. At a certain point, the strength of magnetic connections is weaker than the gravity pulling on the whole structure and it collapses.
The key to building a large magnetic sculpture is to figure out how to brace it together until the last magnet is attached. Once a large magnetic sculpture is completed it is remarkably sturdy, but until complete, it will be wobbly and unstable. The bigger the structure, the more unstable it is due to gravity.
Magnetism is 10^40 (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times stronger than gravity. This is why a small magnet will cling to a refrigerator even with the Earth’s gravity (1 g) pulling it straight down.
Unlike gravity which only attracts, magnets have two poles. No matter what shape a magnet is, its north pole will repel all other north poles, and attract all south poles. Both poles will attract ferrous metal such as steel.
The strongest magnets are made from an alloy of neodymium, iron, and boron. They are usually plated in nickel and referred to as neodymium magnets. Neodymium magnets are eighteen times stronger than common ferrite refrigerator magnets allowing intricately designed magnetic sculptures to be built.
The Philadelphia robot Factory is dedicated to exploring the strange behavior of the electromagnetic force in its many forms.
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“If gravity had been sometimes attractive and sometimes repulsive, like electrodynamics, we would never notice it at all because it is about 10^40 times weaker. It is only because gravity always has the same sign that the gravitational force between the particles of two macroscopic bodies like ourselves and the Earth add up to give a force we can feel.”
— Stephen Hawking
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