Magnetic Attractions

Kate will talk about the future of Fusion power – the ultimate global challenge techno-fix. Fusion power has been a utopian concept for many years now – clean, secure, limitless power – and has yet to come to fruition. We’ll learn the latest status of the technology, how likely the remaining technical challenges are to be resolved. We’ll also find out about some of the non-technical challenges affecting the delivery of fusion such as the global political and financial landscape.

Everybody knows that there are no magnetic liquids. Liquid mercury is a metal but it is not magnetic. This talk seeks to explain why this is the case and to show how liquids can be made magnetic and what happens to them when they are. This leads to some very strange effects due to the fact that a normal liquid is only subject to the force of gravity and therefore has a flat surface, e.g. when a magnetic liquid is exposed to a magnetic field or to other liquids. These and other effects will be demonstrated in the lecture.