. . . it's on again . . .

I’ve agonised over the experience of dropping valued electronic gadgets to the ground. There came a point when I imagined how alleviating it would be if we could add functionality to these devices such that when you drop one it wouldn’t fall straight to smash on the ground but rather cushion itself better than phone cases do.  I couldn’t help feeling inclined to explore a scheme where the device would detect it was falling and use it’s electrical energy to transiently enact this protection. Being me, I gravitated towards looking for some property of the earth that could interact with this momentary state of the device, say, a phone. So I thought of the earth’s magnetic field. If we went down this alley we might say of the concept, “We’ve conjured up a form of ‘geomagnetic cushioning’.” Entertaining the idea further I thought, from  electrodynamics we’re  cognisant of a principle known as the Lorentz force law (which I've mentioned in prior articles) that informs us a char...