Magneto, always one of the more interesting Marvel villains, was able to levitate through forces of pure magnetism. Unlike some supers who could simply fly, with no explanation as to how, Magneto was (sort of) backed by a scientific explanation.
Today, I discovered an article from last summer about scientists achieving a Casimir Effect in the lab, effectively enabling them to levitate matter. These are the same guys who told us that an invisibility cloak is technically feasible:
The University of St Andrews team has created an ‘incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.
Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.
Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.
The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.
The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.
Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attract.
[snip]
Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.
The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.
Considering that they’ve had a full year to flesh out this theory, I fully expect an anti-gravity ray to be showing up at ThinkGeek this Christmas.
Invisibility has been out for a while, at least at high level research. Pretty basic but cool theory using millions of fiber optic strains to cover an object and transmit the image ahead of it to the rear thus creating a kind of invisibility. Should help make the Governments job of spying on us just a bit easier.