Dennis Whyte

It's the same thing here.

And if it's immersed in this magnetic field, you're not actually physically touching it, but you're making a force go onto it.

So that's the inherent feature of magnetic confinement.

And then magnetic confinement devices are like a tokamak, are basically configurations which exploit the features of that magnetic containment.

There's several features to it.

One is that the stronger the strength of the magnetic field, the stronger the force.

And for this reason is that if you increase the strength of magnetic fields, this means that the containment, because namely the force which you're pushing against it is more effective, right?

And the other feature is that there is no force.

So, for those who remember magnetic fields, what are these things?

They're also invisible.

But, you know, if you think of permanent magnets or your fridge magnet, there are field lines, which we actually designate as arrows, which are going around.

You sometimes see this in school when you have the

You know, the iron filings on a thing, and you see the directions of the magnetic field lines.

Or when you use a compass, right?

So that's telling you north, because we're living in an immersed magnetic field made by the Earth, which is at very low intensity magnetic, but it's strong enough that we can actually see what direction it's in.

So this is the arrow that the magnetic field is pointing.

It's always pointing north for us.

So an interesting feature of this force is that there is no force along the direction of the magnetic field.

There's only force in the directions orthogonal to the magnetic field.

So this, by the way, is a huge deal in a whole other discipline of plasma physics, which is like the study of our near atmosphere.