Get it up: How levitation really works DRAWING BY DEBORAH DERR
MCCLINTOCK Q. Levitation– floating in midair as if by turning
off gravity– sure looks like fun in magic shows. Is it true a
real frog has been levitated? And if a frog, why not you? H.
Houdini A. To the world's amazement, researchers at the Nijmegen
High Field Magnet Laboratory in Holland did manage to suspend a
frog in midair with a balancing force of magnetism, as close
perhaps as we'll get to a sci-fi anti- gravity machine, they
said. The key is diamagnetism, a quantum phenomenon by which it
turns out everything from wood to pizza to "frogs and even
humans can be lifted by a magnet– providing it is strong
enough," says Roger Highfield in The Science of Harry Potter:
How Magic Really Works. All the billions of electrically charged
atoms within, moving rapidly about and generating magnetic
fields, make a body levitatable. "When the little frog underwent
this form of levitation, it looked comfortable inside the magnet
and later happily rejoined it