Have you considered using schlieren imaging to get a better look at how the air currents are affected by the magnets? Might give a more accurate view of what's going on. Would hopefully see the hot air be suddely affected. Also with actual fire there's a good chance the charges in the ionized gas molecules play a large role. But the just hot air thing is super weird. Great video!

Some flames are actually considered to be a plasma. However, the degree of ionization in most flames is still low compared to other examples of plasma; such as an arc which still have a relatively low degree of ionization. If you apply a high voltage to a flame instead of a magnet you will generate an "ion wind" and have a similar effect to what you are seeing. The wax candle produces more soot than the methanol flame and the soot is easy to ionize in the flame, that is why the effect is more pronounced with the wax candle. Also, some wicks have metal in them which might contribute as well (i'm not sure if this was the case for your candle). If you were to repeat the experiment with a pure hydrogen flame you would see almost no effect, because hydrogen flames produce practically no ions. Flame ionization detectors work on the principal that hydrocarbon flames produce ions in proportion to the number of carbon atoms in the hydrocarbon (which is still an unexplained phenomena funny enough). Even though this effect is almost certainly due to the flame ions, it is still not a completely well understood phenomena and there is still much to learn! Also, there is a good book that explore this topic by Weinberg entitled, "Electrical Aspects of Combustion." (www.amazon.com/Electrical-Aspects-Combustion-Weinberg-Lawton/dp/B0037F75IK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531716710&sr=1-1&keywords=electrical+aspects+of+combustion) Thanks for the great video! Hope to see more like this!

Although a candle flame (or a methanol flame) is not hot enough to ionize all the particles flowing between the poles of the magnet. There will be a small percentage of these particles that do ionize due to the statistical nature of the thermal distribution. Gas powered MHD generators benefit from this. Potassium has one of the lowest thermal ionization temperatures and is much more available than cesium. It might be interesting to see if seeding the flame with potassium carbonate would enhance the effect. By the way, very nice video!

Great tests! Very interesting. Love the EM setup.

You can make a Schlieren imaging setup to see the flow of the hot air more easily. You may even be able to get away with simply shining a flashlight on it and observing the shadow if the index of refraction of the hot air is sufficiently different than the ambient air.

This is the best fundamental science channel in existence anywhere. I wish this series would continue! The fundamental physics effects on luminous gasses and spectra are so much more interesting than just the magnet designs alone! A correction at 3:50, you aren't experimenting with the "smoke" here (ie. diamagnetic carbon/soot particles) but rather the *paraffin vapor* , this was established by Faraday in his experiments on a candle flame in the 19th century at the Royal Institution whereby he relit the candle by igniting the flammable paraffin vapor trail in air some distance away from the wick. Also I don't see anyone else having mentioned it yet, but Derek Muller demonstrated this exact same thing with the vapor in 2012 but with *electric* fields at a museum in Paris where the French call the experiment "le papillon". kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l52Pa6qUxLLQomw.html

Great video thanks. You should try with smoke in the bubble.

You may have overlooked the impact of the Krasnow Effect: super cool video and its localized effect on spacetime.

What if you suspended a piece of Dry Ice above the electromagnet poles? It might be easier to see the C02 stream flowing down.

I like your sophisticated contactor for switching the magnet.

Great work! Love the way you continue to build experiments to test your hypotheses and show your negative result; most people remove those but they are educational as well

This is why I love this channel, just the documentation of investigation, exploring all the 'what about's Never change.

Nice experiments. I was hoping that you would have a resolution to this question at the end of the video.

New Applied Science video means this had been a great weekend!

Great work as always! As a cognitive neuroscientist, it’s refreshing to see tangible experiments on basic physical processes like this 👌

Very cool demonstrations!

You put your gas bubble in the very center of your magnet, where the field is uniform. If you want to produce a force on the bubble you should put it at the edge of the pole where the field is inhomogenous.

I love your monotone voice describing high-end scientific things. Hey guys I got a electron microscope or hey guys I did some amazing optic things and now this lovely magnetic show

Anything a man could think of to say "It's not that, it's something else..", you've put that "Something else" in the video and proved it wrong. Well done

I love your experiments, literally the best channel for those.

You need to play with schlieren photography to capture the hot airstreem deflection.

Hey Ben, one Tesla and one nano coulomb in the candle plasma will make one nano Newton of force at about 1 meter/sec. about the speed of the flame moving. I did not calculate the likely mass of plasma (very small), maybe you could put a pair of electrodes in the plasma and run some current through the plasma without the magnet to estimate the conductivity for a coulomb estimate.

This is the first video of yours that I've watched, absolutely amazing! Instant sub and notification, going to go binge some more.

Love your videos! Keep up the good work. Its amazing what everyone can learn on youtube.

Maybe you can try Schlieren Imaging with magnets to see the effect better.

My favorite mad scientist

Always delivering super high quality content. Thanks for every single informative and interesting video Ben :)

This is a hell of a rabbit hole can't wait to see where it goes love the videos keep up the good work

try using a schlieren setup to film the hot air

Is a flame made of plasma? Because if it is, plasma is electrically conducting and effected magnetically. So that could be another cause, if my assumptions are correct?

For years I've been saying that a candle flame has to be a influenced by magnetism or maybe be some kind of toroidal magnetic field effect, like what you see on the surface of the sun. But its always a passing thought. I finally looked it up and I'm so glad I found your video!! Thanks

Man you videos are so relaxing. I wish you made videos more often :D

Could that possibly be because of the Senfleben-Beenakker effect and the varying thermal conductivity and viscosity of the gases based on the magnetic field strength? Just an idea.

I love science ❤

Thank you for building this and testing these things.

I really need to remember to thumbs-up your video more. They are nearly always so interesting.

plasma in the flame is probably also responding to the magnetic field

Do you still work for googleX I feel like you do

very interesting going through your thinking process and experiments. thank you for your videos and dedications to understanding (exploring home) physics.

Incredible! Love videos like this of you just exploring with curiosity!

The smoke from an extinguished candle (mostly) isn't smoke, it's paraffin vapour...

The 'smoke' from a freshly blown out candle isn't carbon, it's paraffin vapors condensing in air.

Great video as always! I’m looking forward to the next one.

god i love this channel. what a treasure it is

Why not construct a partial toroid core magnet (I.e C shaped and put the target in the gap)? you might be able to build a higher field setup that way. The construction of your current setup seems pretty lossy.

You need to cool your electromagnet with liquid nitrogen for maximum power

Awesome series of experiments, that was pretty fun !

So cool! Great work as always Ben!

If you use a permanent magnet be careful not to get it too hot.

You are incredible. God bless you and thank you! :) Matthew.

Absolutely fascinating. Wonderful experiments. Great job.

You videos are simply the best and I'm looking forward the video on magnetics. I have a few challenge projects for you: 1. Make an powerful electret 2. Make an LED from scratch 3. Make a tin sulfide thin film solar cell w/ sputtering or evaporation Thank you for your great explanations. You have taught me so much. There are so many cool phenomena I might never have known without your videos.

Maybe the higher energy particles of hot air having electrons spinning faster and reacting with magnets stronger. You could also try this backwards with a doughnut shaped cup of liquid nitrogen exhausting out to the side and put paper on the bottom and see if the current of cold Air is any less reactive, maybe all the air is similarly responsive to magnets however it might be easiest to see it in hot air/ a flame. also what about using a gas and a corresponding wavelength of light that it absorbs to see the effect, also try polarizing the light, and if you think about the reaction there are electrons being transferred and maybe that gives each individual reaction a magnetic impulse that is usually random and canceling it's self out. I would be interested to see you hook the magnet up with a super sensitive current detection method and testing if you have the magnet on and you pass a Bunsen burner flame through does it effect the strength of the magnetic field at all? And what about different flames, like a pure H + 2O = H2O flame and have 2 cheap glass eye dropper tips releasing the gases almost straight up and as close to each other as you can and set it up so that you can turn the system 360 degrees or at least 180 degrees so you can see if one gas being on one side makes a difference, you want to aim for something like laminar flow with the 2 gasses on either side of a wall or at least not mixed.

Because we live in Electric Universe. Everything is electromagnetic in nature.

This a pretty incredible discovery, so many experiments to do with this!

One of thE Best channels around imo

very well made and explained! insightful and entertaining too!

Interesting I do a lot of fire walking before I walk I increase my vibration ie my magnetic field as a result I feel very little heat on the Fire when I walk across. I believe you nailed it, the reason I can do that is because of magnetism Thank you brother keep up the great work

Awesome Ben! Fascinating! I want to know more! :D

Brilliant as always :) Keen for your magnetics video.. the magnet in this one is awesome!

Nice setup and demonstration

It was me that posted the original comment on your first video. Firstly , I love that you took interest and built this rig to test what I mentioned. What I neglected to say in my original comment was that a portion of all flames are plasmas. Ie , former covalent bonds(or ionic depending upon what is burning) have been broken to form new bonds ( commonly oxides of course) . New molecules are forming in the oxidation process and in that process there will be a statistical population of free ions. .. it is these hot free ions that have too much energy to be able yet to form a new covalent bond with oxygen.. essentially this occurring once the process is in steady state runaway .. ie excess heat is present from other oxidations which I believe directly breaks other bonds, directly freeing atoms from their former electronic balance into an ionic state. Hot gases, less dense, rise in air and create a stream of free ions .. so the flame essentially acts as a free air electric current stream between your electro magnets. The rest is obvious and I expect I need not say more. Interestingly a candle flame in zero g burns as a sphere! .. no vectored gravitational field to create the differentiated bouancy force. Love your channel btw. Brilliant return to the original experiment with the sodium in the vial! Great work as always! PS. An interesting experiment might be burning different materials and seeing if you can get different materials to deflect in different directions.. some materials might create different populations of positive or negative ion streams... Although my guess is most will be positive.. seeking to bond with negative oxygen's ? .. but I'm totally guessing here. :)

The Zeeman effect is probably active here. But the Lorentz force also acts on the charged particles in the flame. Tricky to separate the two effects, but you've done a good job trying to isolate the various effects.

Great use of the scientific method. Good job.

I just tried this with a tealight and two hard disk magnets. It works! So cool. :)

This is really cool! I only recently noticed this effect in a classroom demo - we use flames to induce sparks between arcing horns connected to a high voltage transformer. A fascinating investigation, thank you!

Very cool basic and unknown phenomena. Although we know a lot about magnetism we still know little. Interested to learn more.

Awesome video. Very interesting as always.

Обалденный опыт ! Я даже не задумывался над этим !

So clever while trying hypothesis, it changes from KZfaq "science", great !! :)

Really cool demo.

Hi, thank you for the great video! Another explanation to consider is based on science of plasma and quantum electrodynamics. Although a candle flame does not reach a temperature to create enough ions to be considered a plasma, it still produces some free electrons that will have the highest temperature which causes other gas molecules glow in a yellow-red color. These ions are extremely responsive to magnetic fields and could be guides with a magnetic field which in result will guide the flame. This property is used to create a magnetic chamber for a fusion reactor that could handle extreme temperatures. One way to experiment this is to measure how many ions are created in a candle flame and then calculate what is the minimum magnetic force required to affect amount of hot gas in the flame. Same calculation should happen for carbon due to its magnetic response and then the sum of the two calculations should match the minimum magnetic field strength applied to move the flame in reality.

Those are some nice electromagnets. You can see the coils contracting when you connect them.

Friend of mine works for Siemens, maintaining MRIs, one really interesting effect he told me about is that their magnetic fields can be strong enough to mess with your short term memory if you move fast enough in its vicinity

your video are such amazing , thanks from quebec canada ,

Im excited for the video on magnetics! Great vid, Ben! I know this probably wouldn’t happen, but if you, Cody from Codys Lab, NightHawkInLight, Thought Emporium, Destin from Smarter Everyday, and The Action Lab could do one massive collaboration project, I think that would be awesome for us brainy types and may break KZfaq! It would be really cool to see what so many great minds would come up with! Keep it up, man!

Love this channel

scientist in the truest sense, your videos are an inspiration

Wow! The Semen Effect is cool!

Great setup! A few comments have already mentioned it, but the candle flame is a form of plasma which contains ions. Ions are deflected by magnetism.

back in college days i used magnetic fields to affect an argon laser i built to study the zeeman effect and the possibility of tuning and increasing the power in this laser.i found that there was indeed and increase in a particular spectral lines etc. This is was done in 1980's and of course i started to get into the free electron laser and soft xray designs etc. published some findings and went to go work at LLL labs but they had a long hiring freeze which prevented me from going to work there etc....Oh well such is life .... Nice videos keep up the good work!

Really fascinating insights! Thanks!!

Brilliant work. I wonder if fires can be fueled more on days when our field strength is greater. Helps in understanding solar flares in a laboratory. That is a huge difference. Thank you for all of your efforts and troubleshooting.

I would really like to see the effect of changing the orientation of the magnetic field relative to the motion of the candle flame. It might help give an idea of how significant the effect of Faraday's law type of forces are in comparison to the purely magnetic effects.

Hey that was pretty cool experiment keep up the good work it's how we get educated

This was recommended to me, very cool!

Amazing work!

Fascinating! You should try this with a hydrogen flame so the exhaust is pure water vapor, no carbon at all.

This is pretty interesting and kinda touches on somethings I've been curious about for a bit. The fact that they're diamagnetic is good to know. This makes the lightsaber i've been poking at much more possible. I need an AC signal to do it. not just a DC signal, which will launch/deflect the flame.

Once more interesting choice of a subject , to say the least

Nice experiment!

Nice. I was skeptical following the first video, but find the metallic sodium absorption modulation to be a compelling demonstration of the Zeeman effect. BTW, diamagnetism/paramagnetism require a field gradient to be manifest. So by placing the bubbles in the center of the poles where the field is most uniform, you have minimized any effect you might observe.

Love this stuff!!! As a sceptic to just about anything, including Descartes, I love these experiments. We only did so many in school, and some of them actually blew my mind off. Especially Young´s double slit experiment. My first thought on any result from this video was far from anything presented, but it was also what I wanted clear off the table from get-go. Air temperature. Please do many more experiments on this. My intuition tells me it has nothing to do with air temp! What about a macro scale magnetic Casimir effect? Warped space due to energy density, invisible (as always) gravitons. Einstein's unified field theory. You get the point. Do more research please. Love your channel :-)

Interesting! Just saw this video, so I went into the kitchen and grabbed a small lighter torch we use for lighting grills and such, and a neodymium magnet that came with a ferrocell I bought online. Sure enough, with the lighter braced against the edge of the counter and the magnet pressed hard against the counter top (the lighter’s end is metal so it’s tough to keep them from clamping together without clamping them in anything mechanical), there is a small but unambiguous outward push on the flame as the magnet is slowly slid toward it. i never knew that.

It kind of reminds me of an effect off of Lenz law. Good stuff man!

This is a question that someone posed a few years back during an undergrad course, which sparked (pun intended) a lot of interesting debate about this exact question -- so it was very cool to see this video pop up and you did a great job as usual testing hypotheses. I believe it is due to paramagnetic Oxygen molecules being organized, or aligned, inside of the magnetic field. Any flow of gas through the space, in your present cases: hot gas flowing upwards, will hence be deflected around the organized gas molecules. This can explain what you observed, the candle-smoke in particular providing a visual which seems to match such an explanation. I see others have mentioned that ionization and formation of plasma during combustion is the cause of the deflection, but ionization at candle temperatures is unlikely and I don't think such a small population of ions can account for the dramatic effects in cases where a flame is used; not to mention the flame will still have a net neutral charge.

Well played, good science !

Well explained. Loved it

Nice finding of the diamagnetism. And testing of paramagnetism. This effect is also caused by the magnetic braking effect caused by eddy-currents in plasma. The magnetic field brakes the plasma. Just like a magnet dropping in the copper tube.

I love a mystery! I propose setting up a Schleren (sp?) camera and flow gasses in the air, through the gap. You would free the gas flow from any restrictions of a bubble that way. Differing density from air might mess things up but perhaps heating or cooling the stream could counter that. Now my simple idea just got complicated.