Jamie's Blog

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

Scientists working on levitation


The same team of scientists that announced a theory that might one day lead to invisibility, has come up with a system that could lead to levitation. Physicists Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin of the University of St Andrews in Scotland have come up with a way to reverse the casimir force on nanoscale objects. Casimir force was discovered in 1948 and is the reason why very small objects "stick" together. Scientists do not fully understand why the casimir force works, but it is what causes atoms and other subatomic particles to attract each other. It's also the reason why a gecko lizard can walk up sheer walls and across ceilings. For the moment, the system that reverses the casimir force works only on the nano scale, but the theory behind it should scale up to larger objects. Such as people.

Check it out at PhysOrg: Scientist float levitation theory

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5 Comments:

  • Levitation would be very nice and funny. But it seems to be still very far away.
    I suppose, applying these reversing-casimir-effect-forces on human body, which is compound of many different particles, would mainly cause a really big swelling!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at August 07, 2007 10:36 AM  

  • I read about it and I have to correct:
    swelling (or even explosion :-) wouldn't really be probable.
    But if "levitation" would occur it could be some nanometers.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at August 08, 2007 2:52 AM  

  • I suspect that any large scale levitation would be applied to inanimate objects. So it's more likely that a person would ride on a levitation device, than that they would levitate themselves.

    By Blogger Jamie Barrows, at August 08, 2007 8:10 AM  

  • Oh yes, this sounds very good.
    An old German (he must have read your blog!) made the proof, that levitation is really possible riding a DoraDonga mud ball.
    Here is the document:
    http://www.scifilm.org/museimages/munchhausen43.jpg

    Probably this might be a stimulation for you to complete shortly your own doradonga.
    For security reasons you could combine it at first trial with the balloons from 07-11-2007.

    Astounding how applicatory your blog is!
    :-))

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at August 08, 2007 10:41 AM  

  • LOL Very funny.

    By Blogger Jamie Barrows, at August 08, 2007 10:54 AM  

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