Winga
12 Aug 2007, 09:06pm
Physicists from St Andrews University in Scotland seem to have engineered the forces of nature that could ultimately lead to machines with moving parts that levitate (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/06/nlevitate106.xml).
By reversing a phenomenon known as the Casimir force, which is the term given to the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together, they able to get them to repel instead of attract. This field of quantum mechanics normally reserved for the world of atoms and subatomic particles could be used to levitate objects as big as a person.
These are the same chaps that put forward a theory recently that showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. What will they think of next?
By reversing a phenomenon known as the Casimir force, which is the term given to the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together, they able to get them to repel instead of attract. This field of quantum mechanics normally reserved for the world of atoms and subatomic particles could be used to levitate objects as big as a person.
These are the same chaps that put forward a theory recently that showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. What will they think of next?