Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Disciplines grow at their boundaries. The interdisciplinary topics considered here fall into three groups. One is mainly concerned with liquids: paramagnetic liquids, ferrofluids, magnetic levitation and confinement, and magnetoelectrochemistry. The second relates to life sciences: magnetism in biology and medicine, magnetic imaging and magnetically aided diagnostics. Finally there is planetary and stellar magnetism, covering the magnetism of rocks and the Earth's magnetic field, as well as and those of other planets, the Sun and stars.
Magnetism has been a spur to human curiosity for centuries. The force field with its attractive and repulsive interactions led to dreams of levitation and perpetual motion, and hopes for cures of illness, as well as a striving for understanding. These hopes and dreams have been realized in unexpected ways. Magnetism is a mature discipline with a secure physical foundation, which allows it to engage in interdisciplinary joint ventures with other branches of science.
If perpetual motion has proved to be a pipe dream – periodically revived to peddle to gullible investors – it nevertheless finds an echo in the stationary states of quantum mechanics where the electrons occupy quantized orbits. There, they enjoy undiminished motion, at least until they exchange a quantum of energy with their environment. But they can do no work in their stationary states. Energy conservation is inviolate.
Levitation is a more practical proposition, but again not as people imagined long ago – for example, Jonathan Swift's island of Laputa, the ‘coffin of the Prophet’ in Medina or the golden idol in the temple of Somnath.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.