Scientists Move 15-Ton, 50-Foot-Wide Magnet from New York to Chicago (Video)

When you have a 50-foot-wide magnet that weighs 15 tons, odds are you're not going to move it anywhere fast--even if you're one of the scientists on Long Island that have worked with the magnet for years. The researchers plan to move the massive magnet from New York to Chicago with an expected travel time of a month.

To put that in perspective, it takes only a little over two hours to take a plane from New York's Laguardia airport to Chicago's O'Hare airport. Even if you're driving it, it only takes about 13 hours to make the trek between the two major cities. So why does it take so long to move the magnet? Good question.

The unfortunate fact is that the magnet can't be disassembled or tweaked too much; otherwise, it wouldn't maintain its functionality. Instead, it has to be moved as one, huge piece of equipment--at ten miles per hour at night. While that may give a few late night drivers some road rage, the slow speeds are necessary. If the magnet is twisted even as much as an eighth of an inch, it could break for good, according to The Atlantic Wire.

It's not all going to be over land, though. After the very, very, very slow process of wheeling the magnet toward the shore, it will then be loaded on a boat where it will head south, go around Florida and then use the Mississippi River to get as close to Chicago as possible before being offloaded and going over land once more.

The electromagnet itself was the largest in the world when it was built by scientists at Brookhaven in the 1900s, according to the AP. Yet now, the scientists at Brookhaven no longer need the magnet, which means that it's being moved to its new home at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. There, scientists will use it to conduct a new experiment that will study the properties of muons, subatomic particles that live only 2.2 millionths of a second.

The move itself is estimated to cost $3 million. Yet it's apparently worth it. If researchers were to build a whole new magnet, the costs would rocket upward to about $30 million, according to the AP. That's pretty expensive for a piece of scientific equipment.

Nonetheless, researchers are excited about the prospects of moving the magnet, despite the long trip. Assuming it arrives in one piece, the magnet could lead to new discoveries in physics.

Want to see the outline for moving the magnet? Check it out below, courtesy of YouTube and Emmert International.