Wished that you somehow had the gift of telekinesis, where you can move physical objects with your mind? Well, you could either be born as a mutant into the Marvel Comics universe and hook up with the X-Men, or you can always do it the hard way like any other human would – through the marvels of science. A bunch of scientists over at the Laboratory of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies in Zurich, Switzerland, have managed to levitate small objects successfully not through telekinesis or some other sleight of hand trick, but by using only sound waves.
Acoustic levitation is said to be superior to magnetic levitation in some aspects, since it will play nice with any object instead of requiring the materials to be magnetic in nature. There is one limitation with acoustic levitation though – the object’s diameter will have to correspond to half the wavelength of the acoustic waves, so that pretty much makes life extremely difficult for you to levitate anything and everything with a single acoustic wave. Theoretically, this research points out that with enough power, just anything could be possibly levitated, humans included. To do so would include a slew of other complications, leaving that as another problem to be solved.
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