The year is 1997. The first DVD players have just released in the U.S., Tamagotchis are flying off store shelves, and while families prepare to divvy up beanie babies on courtroom floors, a group of researchers at a lab in the Netherlands are levitating frogs with high-powered magnets.
What a time to be alive!
Let’s back up a little. The whole frog floating ordeal was an experiment, performed by physicists Andre Geim and Michael Berry, to test an idea involving diamagnetic levitation. Materials that are diamagnetic are weakly repelled by magnetic fields, and these include copper, gold, wood, other organic compounds, and water. Now, since living things contain water, wouldn’t that mean a living thing – say, a frog – could be levitated?
Well, yes! The experiment required 16 Tesla — a few thousand times stronger than a common refrigerator magnet — to get the frogs floating, but float they did. The water in their bodies was repelled by the magnet, causing them to levitate about six feet in the air within a narrow cylinder.
Don’t worry: the frogs were fine, and according to Geim they were later returned to their home at the biology department. Though no one could exactly ask them afterwards how they felt about spontaneously levitating.
A video courtesy AP Archive shows the tech involved, as well as the frog subjects both before and during their levitation adventure. The frog we see bobs and swirls within the cylinder, and you can only wonder what might be going through its tiny mind in that moment. Probably something along the lines of, “Oh god, oh no, what’s happening!?”
Nevermind, that was me when I woke up this morning.
As you can see, they also performed the experiment on a grasshopper and a small plant (the full study cites waterdrops and hazelnuts, as well). “There is no problem with putting a man…to force a man, by this magnetic levitation, to fly in the air. So technically, we could do it to you, without any problems,” Geim said to a likely somewhat concerned reporter.
Wait, what happened?
Why frogs, though?
Simply put: They’re tiny! While it’s possible to levitate a human with this method, as Geim mentioned, you’d need somewhere around 50 T, and the size of the cylinder would have to be adjusted to fit a human. It’s just a bit impractical, but not impossible!
The mad frog scientists would go on to earn themselves an Ig Nobel prize for their success. Geim, meanwhile, would also eventually earn an actual Nobel prize, alongside Konstantin Novoselov, for discovering Graphene in 2004. This combo of prizes would then earn Geim the most prestigious reward of all – a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the only person to have received both!
Scientific frog image courtesy Lijnis Nelemans, made available via Wikimedia.
