PoP Book 06.2s MidRes - Flipbook - Page 11
Flying
Two tiny frogs jerk lazily in the clear liquid at the bottom of a beaker.
It’s a Friday night and almost everyone has gone off to places with much
softer lighting, and probably the clink of glass and ice. The few people
left here are bathed in the hum of extremely powerful electromagnets
and the steady plume of condensing coolant. While they focus on adjusting
and checking the equipment, Andre reveals that, somehow, this is the
night when two decades of nagging curiosity will finally be put to test.
His eyes crinkle with a smile as he looks around his team. His wife Irina
has seen this look many times before.
In the narrow tube at the centre of a massive solenoid the magnetic field
is showing about 16 Tesla. That’s a level of force at which very interesting
things can happen. Impulsively Andre picks up a plastic water bottle and
empties half of it into the tube. Then there’s that perfect synchrony of
focused eyes and paused breath as they all watch. And, like magic, the
water separates into little shimmering marbles — floating weightlessly
in air. They’d joked about it often, but this is the first time any of them,
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in fact anyone at all, has actually seen it happen outside space travel.
The whoops of delight can be heard all through the empty labs next door,
and immediately there’s the need to push the game a little further. One
of the Dutch guys suggests they tip some beer into the tube, but while
they’re still smirking at that idea, Irina says if they really want to show the
sceptics that everything is diamagnetic, they should try something alive
and kicking. She picks up the beaker with the two tiny frogs, and in the
beat of quiet Andre says, with his soft Russian roll of the ‘r’, “Brilliant idea.”
•
It was a random choice, but the single nameless frog they lifted out
and held over the magnetic tube was about to become world famous.
When you watch the video of him turning freely in space, his fragile
legs reaching out for anything solid, it’s an easy step to imagine it’s you
there, floating effortlessly.¹ And Andre Geim confirmed exactly that
— after he’d retrieved the flying frog and set him off again, swimming
around the beaker. “You see… no tricks.” He turns to whoever is holding
the camera, and says: “There’s no problem with putting a man by this
magnetic levitation, to fly in the air. So, technically we can do it with you.”
Andre and his playmates carried on messing about with diamagnetism
for quite a while.² They floated some flowers, a grasshopper, and even
Introduction / Flying
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