To baby boomers and their parents, it may seem that simple magnetic toys, all the rage in the 1950s and '60s, sadly have gone the way of the hula hoop, Howdy Doody and the nickel Coke. They should visit the Bryan Hall office of Ronald S. Indeck, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical engineering.
The engineer, like Noah stocking his ark, has hoarded a delightful collection of magnetic gizmos arranged in a fascinating display. There's a magnetic fun board (play tic-tac-toe or paint facial hair on Powder Peter's face) that drapes the side of his desk; a magnetic fish named Darwin stuck on a drawing board; and, perhaps the most inviting thing of all, a heap of magnetic ball bearings hugging each other in a pile, as tempting to the curious as M&Ms are to the chocoholic.
"Kids don't play much with magnets anymore," conceded Indeck. "I guess there are so many other things more electronically exotic on the market that people forget the simple things. But some of the simple things are just so beautiful. Look at this."
He grabbed a glass-enclosed apparatus that contained little spindles that stick up like playing jacks, then ran a magnet along the glass. The action causes the spindles to come to attention and then play off each other's magnetism.
"Now, that's a very unusual, interesting property, and I guess the fascination lies in the fact that I'm not even touching the magnets and they're showing this force-at-a-distance property. It's almost too simple, and people have lost sight of it as a fascination for kids."
In the scientific, as well as the public, sectors, magnetism still has its pull. Sophisticated machinery such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have magnetism at their essence. Magnetism is basic to the study of the planets, which have magnetospheres, or magnetic fields, about them. (Jupiter, for instance, has such a strong magnetic field that it draws comets away from the Earth.) And, on a purely pop-science level, everyone is curious about personal magnetism - what it is that makes "opposites attract." But magnetism, like gravity, is something that, while still mysterious, generally has been taken for granted.
Fifteen years ago, as he pursued a doctorate in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, and weighed his future in terms of optics or magnetism, Indeck was told that magnetism was a "mature" technology.
He picked up a nano-tape cartridge, smaller than a matchbook. "Most data today are stored magnetically. This little piece stores 1.7 gigabytes of data - that's nearly 10 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, not volumes, but sets. Here we have 1.7 gigabytes. Within a decade that will be 20 gigabytes. That's a lot of data, and the increase has been going on for 50 years. That's not a signal of a dying technology. If, from the day I was born, my density were to have increased a factor of 10 every decade for 50 years, I'd be the size of a battleship."
It's a blessing Indeck is fascinated by magnetism. He and his colleague, Marcel Muller, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering, have devoted a good portion of their careers to magnetism, and by doing so have achieved one of the most striking engineering insights of the decade: collections of magnetic particles (the tiny bits of iron oxide, literally rust dust, that paint Powder Peter's face, as well as coat the back strip of credit cards) have a characteristic signature as unique as a human's fingerprint. This signature, they found, can be used as positive, authentic identification of any object or document that carries magnetic information - from credit cards, bank checks, cardkeys and security cards, to music and data tapes and other computer software.
To understand this facet of magnetism, it helps to visualize concrete. When concrete is in the mixer, the pebbles are constantly, randomly changing position. But when the concrete is poured onto a driveway, the pebbles in each cubic foot form a unique and unchanging pattern. For all practical purposes, there is no other cubic foot of concrete anywhere that has the same pebble pattern. The same is true of all magnetic media. When the magnetic media is applied to tape, credit cards, computer disks, whatever, there are billions of iron oxide particles fixed into a polymeric binder. Each of the billions of grains, scattered about in seemingly random fashion, is magnetic. Information is imprinted on the particles by magnetizing them with a strong magnetic field; this information is recognized and turned into an electrical signal in the card reader. The sales clerk who swipes the card through a magnetic card reader gets a digital confirmation of a number encoding vital information that the credit card company keeps on individuals.
The University-patented technology based on Indeck and Muller's work is called Magneprint, and there are license agreements being negotiated with a number of well-respected, though discreet, companies worldwide.
Magneprint is applicable to anti-counterfeit efforts in any area where magnetic media can be applied. For instance, a system of authenticating passports using Magneprint, with a dot of magnetic ink affixed to each passport, could identify the authenticity of passports.
To explain magnetic noise, Indeck uses a metaphor.
"One of the major goals of our research is to understand the medium, 'noise,' and then physically overcome it," he said. "The medium we deal with is much like a street. The same potholes will be there today, tomorrow and the next day. The potholes are anomalies or imperfections that come about from the scattering of magnetic microparticles. So, we look ahead and instead of the 'Funhouse Walk,' where the potholes would be moving crazily around, we know right where the potholes are and we drive right around them. The previous concept of magnetic noise was that it was a Funhouse Walk, a nuisance, really. But now that we know the magnetic noise stays fixed, we can work with the concept instead of against it."
In 1986, Muller and Indeck established the Magnetics and Information Science Center (MISC - or "Miscellaneous Center," as Indeck calls it). By 1989, after working on transducers, or recording heads, and trying to come up with a better recording system with a better transducer, they realized that the centerpiece of what they were studying, the permanence and repeatability of magnetic noise, had been virtually unexplored.
"It was the one thing that interested us as a group, and I thought we had the right mix of people and intelligence to go in that direction," he said. "We're the Miscellaneous Center, so we do miscellaneous things. We're smallish, no more than a dozen researchers, including some undergraduates, and we're very versatile. We've been very good at doing smaller, more innovative research, compared with many other larger groups."
"We humans can't digest information instantaneously," he said. "Neither can computers, for that matter. A good way to store that information is magnetically. I'd go so far as to say it's the best way.
"The Information Superhighway gives us the flexibility and freedom, like telephones did by voice, to connect to just about every node in just about the whole world. Today we can connect computers, televisions and medical doctors sending images back and forth. But if you send nine X-rays across the highway all at once, you need something to read them individually and sort them out locally for awhile. And the magnetic medium is the parking lot for that information. It is an excellent buffer between the human and the highway, a good storage place to put the data once it comes screaming across the highway toward the human."
Indeck, one of four sons of a Minneapolis physician, took his time deciding on a major, considering the sciences, math and physics, and, with his great facility for explaining complex systems, education. Today, the father of three often gives talks at secondary schools and various youth gatherings. By his fourth year as an undergraduate, Indeck changed his major to engineering.
"With engineering, I could take all of the things I'd learned in other science courses, and then I had the freedom to apply them. What makes every engineer different is the experience he or she brings to a particular project, then applying it to come up with new and unusual outcomes."
-- Tony Fitzpatrick
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