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Your Body Is Diamagnetic

Physics · Veröffentlicht am 10.09.2026

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Hold a magnet against your arm and nothing happens. That is not because your body is neutral. It is because the push is very, very small.

Water is diamagnetic. Put it in a magnetic field and it develops a faint field of its own pointing the wrong way, so the field pushes it out instead of pulling it in. You are mostly water. Which means every magnetic field you have ever walked through has pushed you away - by an amount far too small to feel, and never once equal to zero.

And no, it is not the iron in your blood. That iron sits bound inside a haemoglobin molecule, not as loose metal, and it does not answer a magnet the way a nail does. The myth is the boring version of this. The truth is that all of you responds, faintly, all the time.

The push scales with the field, and fields can be made enormous. In 1997 a solenoid in Nijmegen running at about 16 tesla held a live frog in mid-air - a very young one, an object of roughly ten millimetres radius, not the fist-sized animal people picture. Grasshoppers, water drops, flowers and hazelnuts went up in the same bore. Thirteen years later a magnet with a room-temperature bore did the same to a laboratory mouse.

A frog, then a mouse. Nobody has built the magnet for a person, and this is a consequence being worked out rather than an experiment anyone has run - but nothing in the physics says the sequence stops.

Sources:
https://materias.df.uba.ar/ft1a2015c2/files/2015/09/Frog_levitation_Eur_J_Phys_Geim.pdf
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20100033545