In my first post about Magneto I failed to discuss the inventive way he escaped from his plastic prison. His accomplice seduced the prison guard, sedated him, and gave him an injection of some metallic liquid. Magneto then ripped out the metal from the guard and used it to burst out of his jail.
“Magneto uses his powers to lift a security guard from the ground (magnetically) and then kills him by extracting the iron-rich blood from his body (nothing too graphic, but we do see a reddish mist floating through the air plus many tiny bloody spots on the guard’s shirt). He then uses several small metallic balls to smash through his confines and then hit two guards, knocking them to the floor (injuring or killing them).” — Review Site.
Obviously we know that usually humans contain around 4-5 grammes of iron, in molecular form (most famously in the centre of the haemoglobin molecule) — Either this is not enough for an impressive prison escape, or it is not possible for Magneto to manipulate with a magnetic field.
Magnetically Levitating Frog
Magneto’s power is to manipulate magnetic fields. With a suitable magnetic field it should be possible to diamagnetically levitate water or, as famously demonstrated, frogs. Perhaps smuggling frogs into the prison would just make a mess rather than smash through the plastic walls.
Perhaps the injection was of metallic clusters large enough to have ferromagnetic properties, if it is possible this could be injected into a body without causing significant damage (anyway the prison guard is going to die). For a ferromagnetic material it’s prefered to have a single domain particle below a certain size, since the domain wall has a certain energy. What the minimum size is for ferromagnetic properties I don’t know… if we assume it requires the free movement of electrons then it could be around 30-50 atoms which has been shown to be a critical amount for metal-nonmetal transition in transition-metal clusters.
It would also be consistent with Magneto only having the ability to manipulate existing magnetic fields, maybe the guard was injected with metal clusters which are already magnetised.
The guard was injected with around 1 litre of liquid, which had a metallic appearance. Around 20 g – 100 g of metal appeared to be formed by magneto by after extracting the iron from the guard.
Elemental composition of the body source.
Element Mass of element in a 70-kg person oxygen 43 kg carbon 16 kg hydrogen 7 kg nitrogen 1.8 kg calcium 1.0 kg phosphorus 780 g potassium 140 g sulfur 140 g sodium 100 g chlorine 95 g magnesium 19 g iron 4.2 g fluorine 2.6 g zinc 2.3 g silicon 1.0 g rubidium 0.68 g strontium 0.32 g bromine 0.26 g lead 0.12 g copper 72 mg aluminum 60 mg cadmium 50 mg cerium 40 mg barium 22 mg iodine 20 mg tin 20 mg titanium 20 mg boron 18 mg nickel 15 mg selenium 15 mg chromium 14 mg manganese 12 mg arsenic 7 mg lithium 7 mg cesium 6 mg mercury 6 mg germanium 5 mg molybdenum 5 mg cobalt 3 mg antimony 2 mg silver 2 mg niobium 1.5 mg zirconium 1 mg lanthanium 0.8 mg gallium 0.7 mg tellurium 0.7 mg yttrium 0.6 mg bismuth 0.5 mg thallium 0.5 mg indium 0.4 mg gold 0.2 mg scandium 0.2 mg tantalum 0.2 mg vanadium 0.11 mg thorium 0.1 mg uranium 0.1 mg samarium 50 µg beryllium 36 µg tungsten 20 µg
Filed under: magnetism, magneto, Movie Science
“if we assume it requires the free movement of electrons then it could be around 30-50 atoms”
This is quite a good estimate Mathew, but perhaps not come about in the best way.
Useful single-domain particles need to be able to keep all the atoms in their alignment in the absence of an external magnetic field. The lower limit to particle size will then come when a single phonon of thermal agitation is enough to turn all the particles. We can estimate this smallest useful size by comparing thermal energy with the anisotropy energy of a volume l^3. When Kl^3=kT thermal randomizing of the domain orientation is likely. At room temperature (300 Kelvin) with the typical figure for K of 10^5 J m^{-3} we find l is about 3nm, or 30 atoms breadth as you estimated.
Of course, since we have a cube root, our answer is quite sensitive to our estimations, and if we put the thermal energy a bit higher we might have to increase l by up to an order of magnitude which would make your estimate a little on the low side.
If our particles are too small, we won’t be able to expect them to remain magnetized in any one direction for long. Such small particles would be said to be superparamagnetic as each one behaves like a single atom in a paramagnetic substance.
This is your best post ever.
Some X-men fans MUST know the answers!
Nice post. If the iron in our blood was ferromagnetic, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI scans) would not be possible!
http://www.revisemri.com/blog/2006/mri-blood-iron-attraction
Dave
[...] Bizarro terrorism news 12 06 2009 So, two thirds of Americans seem to have difficulty in differentiating between the prisoners in Gitmo and Magneto. [...]