Water's Magnetic Personality
Classical Mechanics
Level
2
If you put a small piece of paper on water and hold a strong magnet above the surface of water and move it around, you will find that the piece of paper moves in the same direction as the magnet moves. This is due to what special property of water?
Ferromagnetic
Diamagnetic
Paramagnetic
Antimagnetic
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
1 solution
This occurs because water is diamagnetic, so it creates an induced magnetic field in the opposite direction to the external magnetic field from the magnet.