This instantly brought back memories of Steorn. I went down a rabbit hole on that one, learned a ton about the vagaries of magnetism, FEA, hydrodynamics, etc.

This instantly brought back memories of Steorn. I went down a rabbit hole on that one, learned a ton about the vagaries of magnetism, FEA, hydrodynamics, etc. It always had a crazy smell to it but the diversion scratched an itch. (The underlying concept was that you could use magnetic viscosity (Sv) to create a time variant BH curve in a magnetic field and cheat a few (micro)joules out of the hysteresis loop of a round trip to/from a permanent magnet. Trouble is that the viscosity always worked exactly against you, like it does in liquid/fluid mediums, dumping your joules into the magnet as heat instead.) There’s an article on Hackaday about this beast of a machine [1]. A comment there got me wondering if you could build an art piece that breaks gravitational symmetry with the moon. A metric ton on earth would experience ~.03mN (~1 sugar cube) of force towards the moon. In the extreme if you floated a one ton granite sphere in liquid mercury, you would likely see some displacement (edit: actually no b/c plane of mercury would be normal to net gravity vector). Building something even remotely acceptable to demonstrate the concept would be tricky. My aforementioned Steorn interest taught me that ferrofluid can make an extremely low stiction bearing. You could potentially ’float’ a mass on a ferrofluid film and let the moon drag it over an exquisitely flat and leveled (1ppm) surface. You’d need to maintain the oil film but it should otherwise just ’work’. 1 - https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/gravity-powered-generator-real-or-fake/comment-page-3/ https://hackaday.com/2013/11/30/gravity-powered-generator-re...