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by lilgreenland 1065 days ago
Copper does this already. It's not like ferromagnets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA
3 comments

In the video, it's when they stop moving the magnet, it maintains its position, neither repelling nor attracting.

Several physicists have spoken up and said this, and a few other tells distinguishes it from any conventional materials, which is why they made the video to begin with I'm sure.

That said I'm just parroting back the things I've picked up from this discussion.

Unmoving copper also neither repels or attracts a magnet. Eddy currents impede movement of non ferrous metals in a static magnetic field. This looks like slow motion falling or resistance to spinning when the metal is in a fixed field. This is how auto belays work.

If you move the magnet, the metal will also move since you're inducing a current and the fields from the eddy currents will react against the moving magnet.

> This is how auto belays work.

That is super cool!

That said, I'm enough of a layman not to be able to connect this explanation to what I saw in the video.

Are you saying because it wasn't moving in "slow motion," we can rule out non-ferrous metals? Or are you saying the alternating movement/stillness of the magnet shows this?

When does the hanging copper maintain a position in the video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k

All I see is the normal dampening and dragging effects that I show in my physics classroom.

As I've said, I'm fuzzy on the details, so I'm relying on the expertise of the physicists here.

I can tell it doesn't react to a magnet in ways that I'm familiar with (copper, iron, other magnets), but that's all the detail I can tell from the video.

It's also suspicious that there's not a control sample of copper in the video. Any scientist trying to be thorough would have controlled for this - shown that you don't get the same effect with just a copper sample as you do with a copper sample that's been coated.
Well after seeing the second video I'm pretty convinced it's superconductive or a good scam. The effect was probably just not strong enough in the first video.
I'm suspicious of the magnet. Take a real close look in the second video: the paper cuts the image so the seam of the magnet blends with the table. But in the video it looks much more obviously like there's two magnets stacked on top of each other.

Which is a weird thing to do when for superconductors you shouldn't need it, but for pyrolytic graphite levitation you would (to get an N-S pole).