• Question: @Ciaran, What do you think we could use to make a hoverboard "Hover"? From: Da man who asked you about da hoverboard!

    Asked by Dr_Kamikaze5 to Ciarán on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Hey Dr_Kamikaze5, nice to hear from you again!

      I want a hoverboard so badly it hurts sometimes…

      I don’t understand the physics behind it (microbiology doesn’t really involve a lot of quantum mechanics! 🙂 ), but I *did* see something that might make hoverboards a reality some day. It’s called “quantum levitation” or “quantum locking”, or the Meissner effect after the man who first observed it back in 1933. Whatever you want to call it, it looks *awesome*.

      It turns out that superconductors (materials that can conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance) behave strangely around magnets when cooled below a certain temperature (it has to be cooled with liquid nitrogen, so that’s pretty cold).

      When you do that, if you leave a cold enough superconductor near a magnetic field it’ll just hang in the air! Here’s a nice YouTube video showing it off:

      It’s still early days yet and liquid nitrogen is dangerous enough that I wouldn’t want to ride anything with a tank of it strapped to me, but the results so far are amazing to look at. So I reckon with some more research, we could end up using this effect to make some hoverboards. And hoverbikes, and hovercars. The future is going to be *awesome*!

      EDIT: I came across this project on Kickstarter this evening. It would appear hoverboards are real after all! 😀 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/142464853/hendo-hoverboards-worlds-first-real-hoverboard

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