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Old 06-14-2021, 04:00 PM   #5
NullNix
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Posts: 929
Karma: 15576314
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK
Device: Kindle Oasis 3, Kindle Oasis 1
Actually, it depends how strong the magnet is! The screen is, after all, electromagnetically driven... big enough fields will interfere with the display process, though I'm not sure how strong that field needs to be: pretty strong, given that the voltage used to drive the thing is 15V over a very short distance. Don't try to read in an active MRI machine, since that is probably strong enough to rupture some of the spheres that implement the light/dark patterns on the display. (Well, actually, since a Kindle contains metal, it would basically turn into a sharp-edged flying brick if you did that, so... don't).

Obviously, if an MRI machine is bad, bigger fields are worse! Don't try to read near a magnetar, though if you did that you'd be in way bigger trouble on account of chemistry basically stopping working due to all your electron clouds and even nuclei deforming under the pressure of the monstrous magnetic field. But... the field close enough to a magnetar is so strong it polarizes spacetime, and a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that this would be enough, at a normal reading distance, to make a typical monochrome e-ink display appear to be in (rainbow) colour! See? Colour e-ink using existing hardware! It is possible! (Caveat: there may be certain minor technical difficulties, such as that the nearest known magnetar is 9000 light years away, the Kindle is not vacuum-rated, and that field would *certainly* rupture the screen and definitely turn the Kindle into something less like a flying brick and more like a hypersonic blob of metallic plasma. Also you'd die in seconds. But, colour!)
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