How Do Magnets Continuously Generate Electricity?

[zoobyshoe]

Notice the mathematical formulas for gravity and magnetism are similar.

What formulas?

 

[workmad3]

According to our current knowledge of physics, energy can never be created or destroyed, merely changed in form. So mass can be converted to energy, if you move an object in a positive direction in a gravitational field will transfer energy from yourself to the energy, where it is stored as gravitational potential energy. If the object is then allowed to fall, this will be converted by the gravitational field into kinetic energy, etc etc.

Moving a charged object or magnetic object in an electromagnetic field is the same principle. You need to use your own energy to move the object in the field and this has a corresponding effect of inducing a current (which will be in the opposite direction to your movement in order to resist said movement). Your energy will come from chemical reactions from plants and animal products that you have ingested, these will have gotten energy from the fusion reaction of the sun and the sun got it's energy from hydrogen atoms, and so on back to the big bang.

As for destroying energy... this definitely doesn't happen, but it can be 'effectively' destroyed through heat loss, as this is a loss of energy into heat dissipation that is essentially unusable by anything. This is, AFAIK, the way entropy increases in thermodynamics.

And a black hole can evaporate from hawking radiation. I think our current standard theories on the matter reckon it would take longer for a black hole to evaporate like this than there is predicted time left in the universe. Otherwise a black hole could conceivably become an entropy reducing mechanism in the universe, with energy being 'wiped clean' by the process of being sucked into the black hole and released again as hawking radiation. This is acceptable on a local scale (entropy and thermodynamics is after all statistical. Local fluctuations in the opposite direction to entropy are possible) but not on a massive scale such as an entire black hole disappearing into negative entropy.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Actually permanent magnets can do work and then do have stored energy.

There is no stored energy in a permanent magnet. Poorer quality magnetic materials become demagnetized with use because the magnetic domains don't hold the magnetized positions under stress as well as the newer magnetic materials do. Given the same initial magnetization, old fashioned hardened steel will lose it's magnetism relatively quickly with use, but the average ferro-ceramic magnet, as in an audio speaker, a newer, better material, will stay magnetized indefinitely despite constant use. In the case of the former no energy is being expended by the magnet with each use, rather, the orientation of the magnetic fields of its "domains" are all going out of alignment. In the latter, better, material the orientation is not subject to slippage like this.

Again: a magnet is not using up some fraction of the energy used to magnetize it when it interacts with something else. The process of magnetization is simply to align the magnetic fields of the tiny "domains". How fast they go out of alignment has nothing to do with the strength of the magnetic field that aligned them, it has to do with the material used.

We can use a magnetic field to store energy, but only in the sense we can use a spring to store energy. A magnetic field is not an energy source any more than a spring is an energy source.

If I tie a string to a magnet and hang it from a tree then stick a piece of steel to the magnet the magnet is doing no more work holding the steel up than the tree is doing holding the magnet up. The force in play here ("working against gravity") is just the resistance of molecules and molecular bonds to deformation. As diazona said, the magnet is no different than a piece of chain link here.

 

[Dadface]

To express things really crudely we can say that if it moves or if it can make things move it is energy.Matter is the stuff and energy the thing that can move the stuff.We can define energy and we can discover conservation laws and come up with theories and all the rest of it but these things are just summaries and descriptions of what we are able to observe.Observations,which are severely limited, are key to what is done in physics and with a small amount of confidence we might be able to state ,for example that mass/energy is conserved justifying this on the basis that with the limited observations made so far this always seems to be the case.
Why is it conserved and where does mass/energy come from are really big questions but I am fairly confident with my answer;
I haven't got a clue.

:uhh:

 

[cragar]

nuclear explosions ,