I have always wanted a half decent excuse to ask this.

How long is a piece of string?

Actually I tend to agree with emcellhannon I blame the skewer. Are you in a position to repeat this with, for example, a pencil?

the skewer was wooden, and the crystals were deliberately chosen to be at least close to the same size.

How about this. The unattractive piece from the edge was contaminated by loose ferrous material from the pot, while the pretty crystal formed more to the center of the ingot, away from contaminants.

or

This give new meaning to Charles Dirrac's comment that it's "more important for the equation to be beautiful than for it to fit experiment."

This was a new stainless steel container. I doubt anything was loose on it.

 

I suspect that both para- and dia-magnetism are more complex than usually taught.

 

I suspect that core electrons (most of the ones which are paired) ALWAYS display some diamagnetism, which in many cases cancels out the paramagnetism of the ocassional unpaired electrons in the valence shell. the exceptions, of course would be elements which had very few core electrons, so the diamagnetic effect wouldn't be enough to counteract the paramagnetic one. These elements would correlate nicely to the ones we usually restrict ourselves to in simple chemistry courses (the first three periods).

 

This is just a hypothesis, of course, but I DID read somewhere that ALL substances are diamagnetic to some extent.

Our Bismuth Video... deals with the radioactivity question especially...

 

i've seen all your video's. I appreciate them and enjoy them immensely. However, I don't recall that particular video explaining the effect I've observed above.

 

By the way I have recently repeated the experiment using a ceramic crucible instead of a metal one to check the ferrous metal hypothesis mentioned above. The results are the same.

I thought I'd post this here. I'm pleased with the results.

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