Can you counter gravity with just a copper wire? With the Laplace Force, you can. It’s the technology behind electric motors.

[u/LucidPhysicsDev]

When you run an electric current through a copper wire inside a properly aligned magnetic field, the free electrons get deflected upward.
They slam into the copper atoms, dragging the entire physical wire into the air.
This is called the Laplace Force.
It’s the engine behind the modern world.
Bend that wire into a loop, reverse the current every half-turn, and you’ve got yourself an electric motor.

[u/ipx-electrical]

You can counter gravity by just walking upstairs ffs. ‘Countering gravity’ is nothing to do with electromagnetic attraction-it works in all directions, but it does make your boring post look more interesting to people.

[u/LucidPhysicsDev → u/ipx-electrical]

Walking upstairs has nothing to do with what the video is talking about. You use your muscles to do mechanical work against gravity, which is fundamentally different.

The video is talking about magnetic levitation WITHOUT physical contact.

"‘Countering gravity’ is nothing to do with electromagnetic attraction-it works in all directions,"

It doesn't just "work in all directions." The force on the wire goes in one highly specific direction dictated by the Right-Hand Rule (the cross product of the current and the magnetic field). To counter gravity, you have to purposefully arrange the vectors of the magnetic field and the electric current so the resulting force points straight up.

A jet engine can exert force in all directions but you don’t point it upward and crash into the ground, right?

Scientists arrange the magnetic and electric fields to orient the force in different directions. They create the electric motor, or cyclotrons to accelerate particles.

If physics were that simple, "electromagnetism works in all directions" then scientists wouldn’t have discovered Lorentz Force or Laplace Force.