By Anupum Pant
Magnets are everywhere. They are in your headphones, phones, computers and what not? In fact, the whole planet, although a much weaker one, is a humongous magnet too. A simple bar magnet has a magnetic field that is about 200 times stronger than our planet’s magnetic field. And it only gets stronger from there.
Then there are neodymium magnets. They can get so powerful, they can destroy things by just getting attracted to each other.
Then come the electromagnets. Some of these kinds are used to handle metallic scrap. They can get magnetized to really high strengths and lift huge amounts of iron scrap and then when the current is switched off, they lose all of the magnetization. These scrap handling cranes can be 200 times more powerful than your average bar magnet.
But the world’s strongest magnets are found in the national magnet lab in Tallahassee, Florida. Besides being thousands of times more powerful than any other magnet around it in miles, these magnets are also built to be compact by utilizing essentially the same principle as the scrap handling magnets, with extremely dense winding which takes months to build.
One such beast is the strongest one there which can boast a field as strong as 45 Tesla. Trust me, that’s huge. Huge enough to pull you apart even if you are in the same building as this magnet while it is running. Being around the building probably gives you hallucinations. Don’t even think about having computers anywhere around it, their memories will get washed for ever.