Breaking Methods to Levitate Discovered
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Scientists and physicists alike have been researching viable means to actually levitate objects. And you thought flying magic carpets were myth or a thing of fairy tales? Not any longer.
Photo Illusions of …
Magnetic Fields
Scientists have already levitated objects using high powered magnetic fields to levitate a frog. But using the repulsive force of a giant magnet technique requires vast amounts of energy.
Invisibility Cloaking Devices
Scientists believe they can levitate objects using the same techniques that researcher Ulf Leonhardt used to create a cloaking device earlier this year. Using the same metametarials and force of energy, cloaking devices could also be used to levitate small objects. Photo Hb19
Force Reversal
New Scientist Tech reports that the cloaking device precisely controls how electromagnetic light waves travel around them. “They can transform space, tricking electromagnetic waves into moving along directions they otherwise wouldn’t.” says Leonhardt.
Leonhardt and colleague Thomas Philbin, both at St Andrew’s University, realized that this technique could also be utilized to levitate small objects.
Photo Mbruck77
Applying the Casimir effect, they plan to insert a metamaterial between two ‘Casimir plates’. When the two plates are bought very close together, the vacuum between them becomes filled with quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. The closer they’re brought together, fewer fluctuations can occur within the gap between them, while the fluctuations on the outer sides of the plates are unconstrained. This causes a pressure forcing the plates to stick together — the Casimir effect.
Leonhardt and Philbin believe inserting a piece of metamaterial between the plates will disrupt the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Metametarials have a negative refractive index, so that electromagnetic light waves entering a metamaterial bend in the opposite way than expected, says Leonhardt. That will cause the Casimir force to act in the opposite direction — forcing the upper plate to levitate.
Federico Capasso, an expert on the Casimir effect at Harvard University in Boston said, “Using metamaterials to reverse the Casimir effect is a very clever idea.” adding that it wouldn’t happen any time in the near future.
Photo Joseph Russel
Floating Golden Ball
Quantum levitation could be achieved much sooner using other methods. Umar Mohideen at the University of California Riverside and his colleagues have successfully manipulated the strength of the Casimir force by increasing the reflectivity of one of the plates, so that it reflects particles more efficiently. Modifying the strength of the Casimir force is the first step towards reversing it, says team member Galina Klimchitskaya, at North-West Technical University in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Capasso has also been working on an alternative method to reversing the Casimir effect, causing an object to repel rather than attract another in a vacuum. Calculations show that a repulsive Casimir force could be set up between a gold-coated polystyrene sphere and a Teflon plate, if they’re immersed in ethanol.
“Although the Casimir force between any two substances — the ethanol and gold, the gold and the Teflon, or the Teflon and the ethanol — is positive, the relative strengths of attraction are different, and when you add combine them, you should see the gold sphere levitate.” he says.
Photo BennehBoy
Capasso’s early experiments suggest that this repulsive effect is possible, and could be used to levitate one object above the other. “It’s very early work, and we still need to make certain this is really happening, but we are slowly building up experimental evidence for quantum levitation.” says Capasso, who presented his results at a conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics in Rochester, New York, in June.
“This is very exciting experimental result because it is the first demonstration that we can engineer a repulsive Casimir force.” says Leonhardt.
Though it’s possible in principle for humans to levitate, scientists are a long way from developing the technology.
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Spherical Cloak of Invisibility
Just imagine the possibilities of this technology if they could develop it for everday use. Bed-ridden people would no longer suffer bedsores, many other patients with severe burns etc would not have the discomfort of beds and many more possibilities.
Now if they linked that with the BYO Chair what fun we could have….we’d all be whizzing around like Harry Potter lol
I can remember at school (yes they had them in my time too) where we could levitate others, it was a very simple procedure, and I still don’t know how, but it worked.
how the hell are those people doing this? did i miss something? can i fly too? interesting article. made me very curious. i definitely have to find out more about those topics.
chilli
That’s a pretty amazing post. Well done!
well Deborah…this is amazing….
I have always loved flying more in my dreams than on planes…..now it seems it can be a reality :0
What makes you an Exceptional Blogger is this: many of us have read this recent news release on levitation, but it’s YOU who put the great photos and story to this news article which brings the story to LIFE! I know a lama who can levitate, but he trained for many years in Tibet to learn this skill. How exciting that levitation will soon be here for all of us! Wheeeeee!
Colin, that’s an excellent idea of application for bed-ridden patients etc. I don’t know that I’d like one of those BYO Chairs strapped to my butt, but whizzing around like Harry potter would be a blast, haha!
I don’t recall experiements of levitation in the manner you’re speaking of, but I remember pressing my arms against the inside frame of a doorway for a minute or so. When you step away from the doorway your arms raise all on their own!
Matthias, I don’t think you’ll be able to fly of your own accord any time soon
Currently the principals are only effective with small objects.
Thanks Bryan
I know that you have an aprehension for flying on planes Kim. This would place the power within your own hands
Actual dreams of flying were my favorite as a kid. I’d wake up so disappointed to find it wasn’t real. Haven’t had them in years tho.
Thanks Kuanyin, you’re too kind, but I’m going to accept your compliment graciously and run with it, haha! Now THAT would be exciting to see actual human levitation in action. I’d be thrilled myself … it could save my butt when it’s chained to my desk from a world of discomfort, snrrrk.
It seems impossible…
I agree with the comment on medical uses. A friend of mine died from an infected bed sore that became severely infected. A little tweaking to make sure a patients limbs can stay in a comfortable position, and this will be an amazing piece of medical equipments.
Jeremy, I’m so sorry about the loss of your friend. How tragicaly senseless to lose someone over something like that!
It further validates Colin’s point, and drives home how important something like this could possibly be to hospitals and medical industry alike.
lol its getting cooler by the post Deb….. and I really like that idea to use it for medical purposes!
very nice post… stumbled…
Unfortunately these mocked up photo’s do a serious mis-service to the real science being discussed. Reversal of the casimir force will be a huge breakthrough, but it will not allow humans to levitate above the bed.
It operates at extremely small scales. It is the casimir attraction that puts a floor on the miniaturization of mechanical systems. Manufacture machines small enough for casimir to come into play and things start binding together. If we can eliminate or reverse this force then we can build ever smaller micro-electro-mechanical machines. We could compute using tiny babbage-style difference engines.
So, while I’m sure the bed levitation idea would be great for sorting out bed-sores, manipulation of the casimir effect is almost certainly not a technology that will provide this. I don’t think that hovering a couple of nanometers above the ground is going to cut it in the levitation stakes – you’d need an electron microscope to see the gap (and the worlds flattest shoes!)
to Kuanyin:
The photos on this blog are fakes and mockups, and no claims are made that these are anything but. The science being described does not operate on the human scale, and does not in any way validate bogus claims of yogis.
please do not see this as evidence for human levitation. If you really want to learn about some really mind-expanding things, learn the real science behind it.
To do so though, you will have to learn about scientific method, experimental validation and peer-review. You will have to learn a very different attitude towards belief than you are currently showing – lets face it, you’ve just picked up on a bunch of fake photos (the top one is even labelled ‘illusion of…’), placed around an article based on real science, and cherry picked this as evidence that a yogi is able to fly (despite the physics in this article saying nothing like that).
I worry that you will then be so convinced that science has proved that human flight through meditation is possible that you’ll go and tell everyone you know about this amazing discovery, but you’ll be inadvertantly spreading fallacy.
While I understand the need to see the world around you as wonderful and magical, it is *even more* wonderful when you look through skeptical eyes, because only then can you be sure you’re looking at the beauty of nature rather than the workings of human imagination. I don’t mean to belittle huyman imagination, but I think it’s very important to see the difference and know where the boundary lies.
Thanks for all of that Pearl
Reg, it would appear that you have some background knowledge, and I appreciate your input.
“you’d need an electron microscope to see the gap (and the worlds flattest shoes!)
” — too funny!
But you appear to be misinterpreting the the gesture behind the images. They’re merely included as fun … a dare to dream if you will. I haven’t stated anything here of leviational grandeur of these magnitudes or led anyone to believe anything of the sort. That was not the intention of the images. Just as you noted, nothing was said here to elude to that.
You’re apparently new here … to know this merry group of regulars is to know that we’re only having fun here. It’s the whole point of this blog. It might appear to some that certain topics may be taken too lightly here, but I assure you that’s not the case.
I’m one of the biggest skeptics there are. I enjoy many of the unusual discoveries, research, and oddities, but I don’t give anything full merit without having ample proof. I merely like to bring to light many of the interesting things going on in the world around us.
And as my father often said which I adopt as my own, ‘believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.’
Thanks for your input Reg.
sweet what you could do is transmit that type of energy to cars to make them fly.
Haha that is the craziest thing ever. Hopefully I’ll be up an flyin around in a few months!
I can’t tell what is true and what is fiction anymore.