Forget a yogi bouncing around on his backside, levitation may soon be available to all of us.
Researchers Martin Tajmar and his team based in Austria have discovered that gravitomagnetism is a trillion times stronger when generated by a spinning superconductor.
Aswell as this discovery pointing towards a new quantum theory of gravity it also makes possible the stuff of sci-fi: a general purpose force field!!
I quote from this week's New Scientist magazine: "Let you imagination run wild: a gravitomagnetic device could levitate cars, create zero-g playgrounds, tractor beams to pull objects towards you and glassless windows that use the repulsive fields to prevent things passing through.
Times they are a changin'
A brief background to gravitomagnetism:-
We don't feel gravitomagnetism as we go about our everyday lives on Earth, but according to Einstein's theory of General Relativity it's real. When a planet (or a star or a black hole ... or anything massive) spins it pulls space and time around with it, an action known as "frame dragging." The fabric of spacetime twists like a vortex. Einstein tells us that all gravitational forces correspond to a bending of spacetime; the "twist" is gravitomagnetism.
What does gravitomagnetism do? "It can make the orbits of satellites precess," says Will, "and it would cause a gyroscope placed in Earth orbit to wobble." Both effects are small and difficult to measure.
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