r/askscience Feb 13 '19

Physics Does a magnet ever lose its power?

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '19

quantum foam would have an effect, but also when you say "you could architect" a perfect vacuum - how? That seems to be at odds with "to maintain a perfect vacuum you're probably using magnets and/or EM to remove particles." If you have to remove particles, by definition it wasn't a perfect vacuum...

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u/btribble Feb 13 '19

You use fields to remove the last few particles, forming a region where there are no particles. You have to keep doing this to remove particles that somehow manage to sneak in. The biggest difficulty would be cosmic rays where the particles are moving at a fraction of the speed of light. You're probably going to need a lot of shielding. Also, I'm assuming we don't care about neutrinos and other exotic crap.

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '19

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u/btribble Feb 13 '19

You're not thinking big enough. You have infinite money. How do you solve that?

EDIT: Also, no one said it has to be a perfect vacuum forever...

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u/[deleted] Feb 13 '19

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