Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Fitness

Would creating a room with an electromagnetic floor, while wearing something with magnets laced throughout, from head to toe, have the same effect as increased gravity?

I think what you describe is possible., though it would need to be more complicated than simply a magnetized floor, and you wouldn’t need to wear lots of magnets, only lots of iron.

It’s possible to produce very high accelerations using magnetic fields and ordinary ferrous materials – for example, railguns, which produce accelerations on metal projectiles on the order of 100,000 times the acceleration of gravity. If one scaled such a device up to fit a human body, and reduced the acceleration to just a fraction of a few gs, you have your goal.

However, generating a magnetic field that’s fairly uniform throughout an exercise room size volume would be very complicated, and I suspect require a lot of electric power. Because human tissue doesn’t have much metal in it – and what it has, it’s unwise to tug at magnetically – such a system would require you to wear metal distributed over you body, with straps and pads to spread its force over good load-bearing parts of your anatomy - shoulders and hips, mainly. So it would feel much like simply wearing a lot of weights in a harness, and would have the same bruising and chafe problems.

Given all this, I think you’d get about the same effect at a lot less effort and cost just wearing a harness with lots of weights.

A better solution, I think, which wouldn’t require you to wear special rigs, would be a room-size centrifuge. Since most centrifuges have been used to train pilots and astronauts to tolerate high-g acceleration while seated, their size and arrangement have been limited to cockpit-size “rooms”, but in principle, they could be scaled up to exercise room size.

Another approach would be to use a large airplane, a sort of reverse of the “Vomit Comet” aircraft used for zero-g training, though you’d only get about 20 sec periods of increased gs, followed by longer periods waiting for plane set up to repeat its maneuver.