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Thread: Is there any relationship between paramagnetism and gravity?

  1. #1
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    Is there any relationship between paramagnetism and gravity?

    I do not understand paramagnetism that well, but it appears that paramagnetic materials are attractive with magnetic fields, although much weaker than normal magnetic strength.
    Likewise, gravity is much weaker than magnetic strength, and is always attractive.

    Has anyone ever tried to explain gravity (mathematically), as being an effect of paramagnetic attraction?

    Thanks.

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    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    I do not understand paramagnetism that well, but it appears that paramagnetic materials are attractive with magnetic fields, although much weaker than normal magnetic strength.
    Likewise, gravity is much weaker than magnetic strength, and is always attractive.
    The magnetic orientations do not line up like other magnetic material. Therefore the combined field is weaker. Not a weaker force. Gravity has no alignment that can cancel other alignments.

    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    Has anyone ever tried to explain gravity (mathematically), as being an effect of paramagnetic attraction?
    Attempting a grand unified theory has been going on for about a century. No luck so far.

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    Gravity and magnetic forces couple to different charges and are described by different order tensors.

    As has been said, GUTs are being hunted for. So far nothing has managed to tie gravity into the general mix.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    Has anyone ever tried to explain gravity (mathematically), as being an effect of paramagnetic attraction?
    Paramagnetism is due to the way the electrons of the material arrange their spins in response to a magnetic field. Gravity is independent of magnetic fields and such ordering. The two are completely unrelated phenomena.

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    Can an electrical field cause paramagnetic material to arrange its electron spins?

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    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    Can an electrical field cause paramagnetic material to arrange its electron spins?
    That is off topic. The electric field is independent of gravity, which was your original question. Further, these questions are not about astronomy and should go in the general science section.
    Forming opinions as we speak

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    Does a paramagnetic force always obey the inverse-squared law, or since it is weaker than a magnetic force, can it sometimes be less than 1/r^2?

    Thanks.

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    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    Does a paramagnetic force always obey the inverse-squared law, or since it is weaker than a magnetic force, can it sometimes be less than 1/r^2?

    Thanks.
    It is not a weaker force. It's a weaker manifestation of the same force.

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    b/c it is the same force, does it always obey the inverse-squared law?

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    Yes. Consider the gravity of the moon vs. the gravity of the earth. Same force, one is a weaker manifestation of the other. But they both obey the same law. The only difference is that the number you start with is greater for one than the other.

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    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    b/c it is the same force, does it always obey the inverse-squared law?
    Can you please tell us something about how far along you are in your education? You are asking a lot of questions that are annoying to many of us because we assume you should know things that you seem not to, but if you are in Junior High School or something, we can give you answers aimed at that level.

    Magnetism does not obey an inverse square law.
    Forming opinions as we speak

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    In high school, I took honors physics, AP math, AP chem, but that was ~18 years ago and I remember very very little.
    My college education was in economics and psychology.
    So yeah, I have the equivalent education of the junior high school level. Apologies for the annoyances.

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    Yes. Sorry I wasn't reading carefully. Magnetism is inverse cube because all magnets we know about are dipole magnets. A magnetic monopole would follow an inverse square law.

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by TOEfetish View Post
    b/c it is the same force, does it always obey the inverse-squared law?
    If paramagnetism is just a different response to a magnetic field, how could the field itself behave fundamentally differently?

    (And as mentioned, magnetic fields don't follow an inverse square law...in free space, at enough of a distance that the geometry of the source doesn't matter, it appears as a dipole with an inverse cube falloff.)

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    Apologies, I meant inverse-cubed law. Got them mixed up.

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