I think the experience of falling slowly down a tube would be very interesting.
I know it would be expensive, but money aside, would it be possible in any form?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7tIi71-AjAMaybe
I imagine the experience would be about as interesting as taking an elevator down a tall building. Maybe I am missing something, though?
I think the big problems are that you need a hefty magnet (which is inherently dangerous) and you can't really split up the magnets over the body (because that is INSANELY dangerous), so you experience that same thing that could be achieved via bungee cord/harness.
You would also need to limit (lateral) movement quite a bit, to get reliable braking...
A x-shaped magnet assembly strapped to the back could work, but you probably could not allow the tube being all that much bigger in diameter than that backpack...
edit: If you allow any fall configuration different from feet-first, the terminal velocity has to be pretty low to reliably not kill people, too. But you could make this work with a net, I think...
I think there would be a similar experience to a reduced-gravity aircraft ride.
Its not necessarily just the physics of falling down a tube slowly thats interesting.
Getting a little whimsical, what if you had an Alice in wonder land experience. Wrap the whole "ride" in strange and fun visual effects while you fall down the rabbit hole.
Or, have protrusions from the tube where you could jump down to different levels and climb up the sides.
But, I really don't know the limitations or whats possible.
So, like an elevator?
I agree that Lenz's law is pretty neat. In high school my electronics class got to visit a research MRI and bring in coils of wire and other objects to experience it first-hand.
You couldn't use multiple magnets on the person or they might smash together, and you'd have to be very careful guests stayed apart, and that they didn't have anything magnetic in their pockets to go flying towards the magnet and hurt them.
You could do it with air pressure, like indoor skydiving in a confined area, but it would probably be loud and somewhat unpleasant.
Since people aren't magnetic it would probably feel exactly the same as jumping with a harness on a cable instead of with magnets.
Unless you used the frog levitation thing but that's a different effect and would probably be really expensive
And that platform would need some engineering to prevent it from flipping.
To be honest the natural end point of what you get after you engineer it for safety probably is literally just an elevator platform.
Although you might wind up with a hundred pound full body suit or something
And I sort of cheated by mentally running through the designs myself, like, yes, you could build a constant thing you just put people in, but, why would people want to go in the thing rather than on the thing? It is intrinsically going to be more claustrophobic in any container than being on it. So you put people on it. Then you do this, and do that, and a whole lot of safety work... and like I said, you honestly just get back to, why would anybody want this at all? Who cares if it's "really" magnets anyhow? And you just end up back at "It's a platform that descends slowly using standard elevator technology." at the end of the design process.
I wonder if you could do this with passive air pressure alone. That way, no strong magnets required and you can use clear building materials so you can see out.
A simple model:
Imagine a hollow cylinder (like a pipe) with one end capped. It is standing vertically, with the capped end down. Now imagine the ride "vehicle" is a plexiglass sphere. If you drop the sphere into the cylinder from above and the plexiglass sphere isn't a perfect fit to the inside diameter of the cylinder, the sphere will fall through the pipe and eventually hit the capped bottom of the pipe. How fast the sphere slows in the pipe will be some function of how much clearance there is between the sphere and the ID of the pipe.
There are elevators that work sorta like this, but with seals and much slower, pneumatic vacuum elevators (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QccXIj0k5qg). At least, they do basically this in one failure mode.
Ok, great. But we want a fun ride. What about, instead of a pipe, a big funnel? Could be straight-walled or shaped like the bell of a trumpet or the barrel of a blunderbuss (i.e., fans out at an increasing rate). Now, since we don't need you exactly in a tight-fitting pipe (at least at the beginning), we can just drop you at the funnel, rather than starting you carefully placed within the pipe. So you get some amount of free-fall inside a clear plastic sphere.
Okay, that's a ride! My gut says that there should be some combination of funnel shape, sphere size, and possibly vents in the side of the funnel that allows us to control the rate of deceleration as you approach the ground such that the human(s) inside the sphere are unharmed and had a lot of fun.
Physics nerds: what say you?
That would be scary, and a cool experience, I think.
This sounds like a really fun ride, actually.
200m of height difference (a lot!) only translates to 0.5°C in temperature difference worth of potential energy (assuming the object has the specific heat of water).
And that ignores the fact that you would have that heat mainly in the stationary conductor (copper tube), not the magnetic falling object (person with magnets strapped on).