In today’s cool news, this!
I want a hoverboard! And a flying car!
It sounds like this method could also be used to disperse atoms of an object. A disintegration ray.
It’s officially the future. At Burning Man a few years ago, I found a remarkable consensus that when we achieved Hoverboards that it would be officially the future.
So, welcome to the Future!
That article is close to a year old. What has happened since and how come we haven’t heard about it?
I’m not holding my breath for that hoverboard.
Obviously the idea didn’t fly.
I like how they chose a completely irrelevant stock photo of a magnetic-levitation top for an article about making frictionless nanotechnology.
My bad! I didn’t look at the date… just followed a link from somewhere else and assumed it was new.
Carry on. :smack:
[sup]No hoverboard? :([/sup]
Well, the whole thing’s been up in the air for a while.
That picture accompanying the article pretty clearly doesn’t have anything to do with the text – it’s illustrating levitation, but not the Casimir Effect -type levitation described. This may give a false impression. My first reaction was “Casimir force? Can’t be a very big effect!” See here:
The article claims that it’s possible (although not easy) to make some sort of “lens” that will make the effect visible and useful outside the quantum regime. I’ll wait until I see it. The really impressive part was that they saw a repulsive, rather than an attractive Casimir effect.
This is kind of a shoddy and misleading article; the picture, for instance, clearly shows magnetic levitation. The Casimir effect which causes the so-called Casimir-Polder force by an imbalance in permissible energies in the vacuum states of an unrestricted space versus a highly confined space. If you make a very, very small box, or put two extremely flat plates very closely together, quantum electrodynamics shows that you have a more limited amount of states that are permitted within than without, and thus, an attractive force is demonstrated in between. It is also possible to develop an electromagnetic repulsive force as a reaction by using certain types of media. However, this all occurs on very small scales, on the order of about 100 Å or less; in other words, about on the scale of a largish basic organic molecule. This is of interest (or frustration, depending on your outlook) to scientists and engineers trying to work on nanoscale technology and applications, but it isn’t going to allow you to build a flying car, at least not directly.
Stranger
You have a point, but I’d love to see the reaction you’d get from a newspaper picture desk if you gave them that spiel. 
(And the second your back was turned, they’d be typing “levitation” in their stock photo search again…)