In fiction, magic makes levitation simple. With a easy swish-and-flick of his wand, Ron Weasley yanks a troll’s membership excessive above its head in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. By swish martial arts, ingredient benders in TV’s Avatar sequence launch boulders and waves of water skyward. And an informal gesture is all Marvel hero Scarlet Witch must fling away enemies.
In the true world, sound, magnets and electrical energy can all create upward forces robust sufficient to cancel out gravity. Simply don’t anticipate these levitation strategies to toss boulders or unhealthy guys. At the least, not with out some outrageous — and harmful — upgrades.
Acoustic levitation gadgets use vibrations to carry objects aloft. These machines usually blast sound waves too high-pitched for people to listen to. The waves create alternating areas of high- and low-intensity “noise” within the air. Noisier areas push objects away, trapping them in pockets of relative quiet — however provided that the objects are very small and light-weight. Among the heaviest stuff to ever surf sound waves are Styrofoam beads.
Greater objects want longer, lower-frequency sound waves to cradle them, says Luke Cox, a mechanical engineer who heads Impulsonics in Bristol, England. He estimates you would wish not less than 275-hertz sound waves with 1.25-meter wavelengths to levitate an individual. A bass guitar performs notes about that low. However it must be devastatingly loud to carry somebody off their ft.
You’d in all probability want the power output of a nuclear energy plant to run such a tool, Cox muses. Plus a protect to guard anybody you levitated from the warmth generated by that quantity of energy. In any other case, your gnarly, nuclear-powered bass solo would possibly actually soften their face off.
Magnets get objects a lot greater than folks off the bottom with out destroying them. For example, those on maglev practice vehicles and rails work together to make the trains hover simply centimeters above their tracks.
Utilizing magnetism to levitate one thing not strapped to a magnet is trickier, however not inconceivable. Many seemingly nonmagnetic supplies, together with water and proteins, are diamagnetic: In a robust magnetic subject, they turn out to be weakly magnetized and begin to repel the sphere.
In 1997, scientists famously used that reality to levitate a frog. They positioned the creature inside nested coils of wire that created a magnetic subject 16 teslas robust — or about 10 occasions the energy of magnets used to select up vehicles in junkyards. That was simply sufficient to buoy the frog to close the highest of the 18-centimeter-tall interior coil of wire.
You possibly can theoretically levitate an individual this manner. It might take one heck of a magnet, although. One of many frog floaters estimated in 1998 that you simply’d want a 40-tesla subject created by a magnet working on 1 gigawatt of energy — roughly half the output of the Hoover Dam.
Ballooning spiders use a special approach of levitation. They electrically cost themselves up by spinning out lengthy threads of silk, says Igor Bargatin, a physicist on the College of Pennsylvania. That cost permits the spiders to carry off in Earth’s electrical subject after which trip the wind as much as kilometers excessive.
The spidey approach of levitation received’t work for giant objects like folks, Bargatin says. You’d must construct up a lot cost that you simply’d find yourself triggering lightning strikes round you and fry your self earlier than ever taking off.
Even when real-world levitation by no means measures as much as on-screen superpowers, it might probably nonetheless be helpful. Acoustic levitation might present hands-off dealing with of lab samples to keep away from contamination. Magnetic levitation might make elements of motors float, permitting them to spin quicker with out sporting down. And scientists proceed dreaming up new makes use of for levitation — ones that don’t trigger lethal collateral injury.
