"Marshall Dudley" wrote in message
...
Greg Neill wrote:

Not to mention that Dudley's mechanism would act as a
brake rather than maintaining the rotation. The
planet's rotation would be damped into synchronous
rotation with the Sun, keeping one face towards it
and thus freezing the magnetic lines of force in
place.

I disagree. If I get a chance I will try to duplicate with an aluminum disk
representing the earth, and a strong magnet experimentally.

Better use a very weak magnet, if you want to approximate
the Earth-Sun system.

BTW, eddy current breaking is old news.


Also not to mention that the magnetic fields involved
are pitifully weak and the energies that they can
generate in interacting with the Earth are utterly
negligible when compared with the angular momentum
of the planet's rotation.

I might point out that a trivial force can cause significant motion to even the
largest bodies when applied for millions of years. Just like a man can move a
loaded train boxcar when on level track.

Sometimes the orders of magnitude can get one bamboozled.
Breaking times for the Earth in the Sun's magnetic
field would be many times the age of the universe.