Magnetic Isopotentials and the Faraday Paradox .

Today we're going to talk about magnetic isopotentials and the faraday paradox. Now I know there's still one person out there who is easily triggered by the word isopotentials, especially in terms of magnetic isopotentials. And no, his initials are not BG. But if you're one of the ones that is easily triggered by the word isopotential, then you may want to skip the next couple of videos that I'm going to make because I'm going to be using this word quite a bit. Okay, all kidding aside, let's talk about magnetic isopotentials and the faraday paradox. So what is the faraday paradox? Well, the faraday paradox is best explained by a device, a very simple device called the homopolar generator. And this was invented by Michael Faraday. Now the homopolar generator consists of a conducting disc, okay, which could be a copper disc or some other conducting disc, and a magnet. And both the conducting disc and the magnet spin on an axis. And the north and south pole are indicated right here. And so this is the magnet is spun about the polar axis. And the conducting disc is hooked up to a voltmeter in this example. And when the disc is conducting electricity, the voltmeter is triggered. And when it is not generating electricity, the voltmeter is not triggered. All right, so the faraday paradox can be explained as follows. When you spin the conducting disc but not the magnet, okay, you get a voltage reading. You get current and you get a voltage reading. Okay, number two, when you spin the magnet and not the conducting disc, you do not get a voltage reading. You do not get current happening in the disc. But when you spin both the magnet and the disc, okay, then you get a voltage reading again. You get current flowing and you get a voltage reading. So the last two situations appear to be a paradox because when you explain this in terms of flux lines, and that current is generated by the motion of the current or the motion of the charges relative to the magnet, then one might think when you spin the magnet you should also get a current. And number three is a bit of a paradox because when you spin both of them, you might think that you shouldn't get any current because there's no relative motion between the magnet and the conducting disc. And so these two, this is what the faraday paradox is all about. But what I'm going to show you is that when, if historically magnetism had been defined in terms of the isopotential pressure gradients that I showed you in the previous videos, then there would never have been a paradox. There would never have been a faraday paradox and there wouldn't have been a paradox at all regardless of who discovered it. So this is where the isopotentials come in to explain this non-paradox situation. So what do isopotentials have to do with the faraday paradox? Well first I think we should do a review of what we, what I have explained already. This is the image generated by Michael Snyder's software. His software generates just a single plane of just one slice of the isopotentials at, this would be at the center of the magnet. And so what I did was I converted this into a 3d image so that you can slice through the isopotentials and look at it from various different cut planes. Okay so originally I had referred to these as isopotential lines and the reason I did that was because that's how mainstream talks about the isopotential lines or the equal potential lines around an electric charge. And so but in reality this is not a line it is a curve and of course it is a contour which you get when you intersect a surface with a plane. And here what I'm doing is I'm slicing through all the cut planes of the isopotential surface which I showed you before is you know like a bubble, like a layered onion, onion layer of different isopotential lines. And of course these are not the only isopotential lines, there is an infinite number of isopotential lines between each of these. And also I want to point out that you know if this is the isopotential line of 0.01 volts this would be 0.02 volts, 0.03 volts, 0.04 volts. So the differential, so the way this graph was generated, the differential between here and here is 0.01, 0.01, 0.01. So you can see that this forms a an accelerating gradient, this is a an accelerating gradient, it would be like it like a hill. Okay so um but when when you look at it just from the polar direction you see it is completely symmetrical, it is completely symmetrical. So if you spin this about the polar axis which is right in the middle here, if you spin this about this point here, the pressure gradient does not change. Okay so this is where this fits into the Faraday paradox. So now what we're going to do is we're going to map the isopotential surface from this field, from this point of view onto the magnet. And so you can see in this direction the isopotential would look more like this, not to scale of course, but just to give you an idea that this is north and this is north and this is south, and that if you map the isopotentials onto one of the poles you're going to get the symmetric circle that you see here. So now you can easily see, now you can easily see that, let's go to point two here, when you spin the magnet and not the conducting disc, okay, if you spin the magnet and not the conducting disc then you can see that the isopotential surfaces, the gradient, the pressure gradient, does not change relative to the disc which is not spinning. So there is no relative motion between the isopotential gradient and the conducting disc. So if we had looked at magnetism in terms of pressure gradients instead of flux lines, because you might think that when you spin the magnet you're spinning the flux lines or the flux lines are changing, which they're not, when you spin the magnet about the polar axis, this is very important, then there is no, there is no change in the pressure gradient relative to the non-spinning disc. And this explains why you do not get a current in the disc, because the disc can't tell the difference between a magnet that is not spinning and a magnet that is spinning. It cannot tell the difference between a magnet that is spinning and a magnet that is not spinning. From the perspective of this disc, this magnet is not spinning even though it is spinning, so about the polar axis. Now of course if you spin it, if you spin it the other way, if you spin it about this axis, if you spin it such that north and south change places, then of course you are going, the pressure gradient is going to continuously change relative to the non-spinning disc, and this is how most generators work. Okay, what they do is they spin the magnet but they don't spin it about the polar axis, they spin it about the, they spin it about this axis such that north and south continuously change places. And so this, the thinking of this in terms of pressure gradients actually solves this supposedly paradox. It's not a paradox, it need not, it need not have ever been a paradox. So the next paradox was when you spin both the magnet and the disc, you get a, you get current flowing and you get a voltage reading. Okay, so, so this, using the isopotential, from the perspective of the isopotential, as I said before, the, the, this disc does not know the difference between whether the magnet is spinning and whether the magnet is not spinning. The pressure gradient does not change. But when you spin the disc, then you have pressure gradient differences between the charges in the disc and the magnet. And so this actually is identical to, it's identical to when you spin the disc, conducting disc and not the magnet, then you get a voltage. And so these two, those two situations are identical. When you spin the disc and not the magnet, you get a voltage. And when you spin the disc and the magnet, you get a voltage because the spinning magnet does not change the pressure gradient. The pressure gradient does not change when you spin the magnet about the polar axis. So this, looking at this from the perspective of the magnetic isopotentials, it's easy to see why this is no longer a paradox. Okay, spinning, it's basically saying when charges are moving in a magnetic field, then you generate a current, regardless of what the, of whether the magnet is spinning about its axis or not. So looking at this from the perspective of the isopotential, magnetic isopotential pressure gradient, pressure gradient, then it's easy to see that there really is no paradox. There really was no paradox and that the, when you spin the conducting disc in the vicinity of a magnet, it generates a current. And this is because when you spin charges, when you move charges, it generates a magnetic field, which creates its own pressure gradients. And then there's pressure mediation going on between the big magnet and the little magnets, the charges that are in here that are create, turning this into a magnet. You can think of this, if this is spinning, this would be like a bunch of rings, current rings. And so all these little pressure gradients are going to mediate with this big magnet and you're going to get some motion going on. Now we're not going to talk about in detail about how this happens. This video is about the Faraday paradox. And so just as a kind reminder that, as Ken Wheeler says, everything is pressure mediation. And so it's my opinion that if we had, if historical physics had concentrated on the magnetic isopotential pressure gradients instead of the flux lines, that there would never have been a, there would never have been a paradox. There would never have been a Faraday paradox in the first place. So, hope you enjoyed this video and I hope everyone is doing well. Take care.