army1987 comments on Ask an experimental physicist - Less Wrong

35 Post author: RolfAndreassen 08 June 2012 11:43PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 10 June 2012 07:26:08PM 2 points [-]

An interesting experiment would be to make a magnet move a lot of stuff and see if it got weaker over time, as this theory predicts.

If you're not thinking of moving a lot of stuff at once, every time you pull a piece of the stuff back off the magnet where it was before you're returning energy back to the system, so the energy needn't eventually be exhausted. (Though I guess it still eventually be if the system is at a non-zero temperature, because in each cycle some of the energy could be wasted as heat.)