The Anti-Gravity Frog
In 1997 a frog learned to defy gravity and you can too.
How many times have you wished you could fly? Not in a plane, or with a jetpack, but float away in a Peter Pan-esque way. Well, one lucky frog in 1997 got that wish. A scientist placed him mid-air in a small chamber, rather than fall to the bottom this little frog floated in the middle, apparently in defiance of gravity. The scientist who did this went on to win an Ig Nobel prize for their work, so how did he manage to make an anti-gravity frog?
This chamber was a bit special. It was the centre of a Bitter Solenoid, a machine that makes powerful magnetic fields. It’s these insane fields that enabled our little amphibian to fly. To give you an idea of how strong this field is, here are some examples of magnetic fields, and how strong they are in Teslas (the standard unit of how strong a magnetic field is). The Earth's magnetic field is 30 microtesla (0.00003 Tesla), a typical fridge magnet is 0.001 Tesla and a powerful neodymium magnet is 1.4 Tesla. But our chamber has 16 Telsa which makes it 16,000 times stronger than a fridge magnet.
So, in 1997 Andre Geim (the astonishing scientist at work here) had his tiny chamber (3.2cm in diameter), his stupidly strong magnetic field and an adorably minuscule frog. He designed the insanely strong field so that it was…
