The actual metal content varies. With plastic bumpers, aluminum condenser/radiator, composite support pieces, the actual amount of magnetic metal may be quite minimal, and there's practically no vehicles that have so much metal in their front end to compare to a slab of metal on the outside.
Newton, the dead guy who’s in charge of physics and which cookies get figs in them, he decides
Archimedes once said something like: "Give me a big enough lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth."
The "place to stand" part is just as critical as the lever part. You gotta have something to push off of in order to move other things. This is a closed system that pushes and pulls only against itself.
Back where I'm from the elders used to call this kind of thing "bait for social media interaction"
Simple. The magnet weighs less than the car, so the magnet is going to be moving to the left. If the force is going to the left, that means the car can only go in reverse.
Nope, unfortunately now the car has been magnetized, and that would swap the polarity, making it move in the opposite direction, which is reverse again.
The magnet pulls the truck to the right. The truck pulls the magnet to the left. They both have the same amount of pull. No one wins this tug-o-war.
The best you can hope for is for the truck to move slightly to the right and the magnet to move far to the left until they meet
Because the magnet is attached to the truck bed, so the bumper is being pulled forward and the bed pushed back, and the forces cancel out to 0.
Dumb follow up question. If there’s a way to reverse the direction the bed is being pushed, with gears or something, will that work? lol
You need a catapult in the back to fling the magnet ahead of you, you get pulled forward, pick up the magnet and fling it again. This technology has existed since the '20s but Big Internal Combustion Engine is repressing the tech.
No, because in the end, something needs to keep moving the magnet forward to keep the truck moving forward.
This thought processes is exactly how scammers on YouTube make perpetual motion seem possible, but by definition, the forces always have to cancel out.
Sure, but you'll need something to turn the gears.
Typically, we use a crank that converts a reciprocating motion into a rotation. Then we move a piston up and down by putting a little explosion at one end. Connect it to a tank of explosive fuel and badaboom, perpetual motion, as long as you have explosive fuel in the tank of course.
Newtons laws of motion, most clearly the third.
"If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."
In simple terms: metal is just as much attracted to magnet as magnet is to metal, this is fundamental and doesn't change under any circumstances.
So the force driving the car forward is exactly equal to the force driving the car backward, and you can't have one without the other.
The truck will be attracted forward towards the magnet, but the magnet will also be attracted backward towards the truck with equal force. The backward force will be transfered through the arm holding the magnet and the net force on the whole system will be 0. If there was no arm holding the truck and the magnet apart, the truck could move forward slightly and the magnet could move backward to meet it. (The magnet would move much more than the truck since they would still have equal force applying to them, and the truck's mass is much higher than the magnet's.)
And then to continue moving this way you'd have to unstick and move away the magnet, which would require just the same energy it takes to move the truck this far away
Imagine that instead of a magnet there's a spring there. Why is it more obvious now that it doesn't work? How is a magnet different than a spring?
Funny thing is that this isn’t technically true. If the fan is strong enough, the current will hit the sail and reflect backward and to the side, creating some very inefficient thrust. Any fan strong enough to achieve this would do better to remove the sail entirely and just point the fan backwards, but it would technically work.
I believe you've invented an air boat.
See the following reference material: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074564/
Full disclosure, I’m an idiot, so I could be misunderstanding something, but im pretty sure that this is based on that principle.
And by the same principle, you could shine a powerful laser towards a very reflective sail and actually move, with the laser as a part of the boat.
I too always found this very funny. Confuses the hell out of people who just understood why the OP would not work.
If the fan blew across an airfoil aligned perpendicular to the axis of the boat, it can definitely generate thrust. The top of the airfoil will develop a lower pressure than the bottom, and the difference in pressure causes force that moves the boat. It's just way more efficient to use a fan to push the boat.
Because the truck wouldn't be loud and obnoxious so no Truck person would ever drive it
They can just roll down the window and talk about their beliefs while blasting that awful new aged country music.
The force pulling the car to the magnet is the same as the magnet pulling towards the car. These two forces cancel out each other.
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A boat with a fan on it can work, because that air bounces off the sail and ends up going backward
In that way it does not. You can move a boat wirh a fan if you use it to blow the air away from the boat to create thrust like a plane. If you direct the fan onto the sail the force of the forward motion will be canceled out by the backwards thrust (if the sail has 100% efficiency which it does not)
Blowing a fan into the sail does work; but it's nowhere near as efficient as normal airboats. You're not gonna move very fast, and it takes a helluva lot of force just to go like 1/16 the speed you could if you just point the fan behind you.
The magnet thing might work the same way; but you'd need a super powerful magnet. Like probably an electromagnet. And at that point, an electric engine is just a more efficient use of the energy.