Magnets and gravity

Do you mean to ask if it is possible to have a magnet orbit another magnet as the Moon orbits the Earth?

If so, I don't think that it is possible without magnetic monopoles.

 

The moon does not exactly orbit the earth, they orbit each other or I guess more properly, a common center of mass.

If you mean that you want to say balance the repulsive force of two magnets with some force or forces acting in the opposite direction, yes, you just have to engineer that situation.

But without some force other than their repulsive force (or attractive if you go the other way) you won't create an orbit, perhaps tying two magnets together on a stinger will create some straight line relationship but then an orbit requires more than that.

 

Isn't he askeing if the tangential force would cancel the attractive force, just like a gravitational orbit? Could you not set two magnets in "magnetic orbit" around each other?

Let's see, you would have to restrict their motion to a plane so that you could eliminate the dipole problem.

Now, magnets attract as the cube of their separation, right? And you'd have the poles acting at both ends (N-S on top and S-N on the bottom), so your force would be 2r^3.

Still, you should be able to (in theory) impart enough velocity upon them to cancel the attractive force, putting them in orbit about each other.

Of course, it would be much more unstable than a gravitational orbit, since any perturbations are cubed rather than squared.

 

You haven't heard about Maglev, or even seen those too-popular demonstration of superconductors levitating in magnetic fields?

Zz.

 

You should know that you won't be able to get magnets to do "work". You can impart energy to the system (just like you could start a pail of water on a string swinging around your head) but it won't do it on its own. Magnets are not a source of energy.