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1 " For decades, new-energy researchers talked about the possibility of treating a magnet so that its magnetic field would continuously shake or vibrate. On rare occasions, Sweet saw this effect, called self-oscillation, occur in electric transformers. He felt it could be coaxed into doing something useful, such as producing energy. Sweet thought that if he could find the precise way to shake or disturb a magnet's force field, the field would continue to shake by itself. It would be similar to striking a bell and having the bell keep on ringing. Sweet - who said his ideas came to him in dreams - turned for inspiration to his expertise in magnets. He knew magnets could be used to produce electricity, and wanted to see if he could get power out of a magnet by something other than the standard induction process. What Sweet wanted to do was to keep the magnet still and just shake its magnetic field. This shaking, in turn, would create an electric current. One new-energy researcher compares self-oscillation to a leaf on a tree waving in a gentle breeze. While the breeze itself isn't moving back and forth, it sets the leaf into that kind of motion. Sweet thought that if cosmic energy could be captured to serve as the breeze, then the magnetic field would serve as the leaf. Sweet would just have to supply a small amount of energy to set the magnetic field in motion, and space energy would keep it moving. "
― , Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World
2 " Why is true success so relatively effortless? It might be likened to the magnetic field created by an electric current running through a wire. The higher the power of the current, the greater the magnetic field that it generates. And the magnetic field itself then influences everything in its presence. There are very few at the top. The world of the mediocre, however, is one of intense competition, and the bottom of the pyramid is crowded. Charismatic winners are sought out; losers have to strive to be accepted. People who are loving, kind, and thoughtful of others have more friends than they can count; success in every area of life is a reflex to those who are aligned with successful patterns. And the capacity to be able to discern the difference between the strong patterns of success and the weak patterns leading to failure is now available to each of us. "
3 " It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature. "
― John von Neumann
4 " Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC’s supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe—even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made.And the extremes don’t end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time. "
― Lisa Randall , Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World