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.
We have to go back.
This video from the AP Archive shows off the frog experiment, performed by physicists Andre Geim and Michael Berry. It was test of diamagnetic levitation. Materials that are diamagnetic are weakly repelled by magnetic fields, including copper, gold, wood, other organic compounds, and water. Since living things contain water, wouldn’t that mean a living thing – say, a frog – could be levitated? YES.
Here’s a picture of a floating frog if you don’t believe me:
The water in the frog’s body was repelled by the magnet, causing it to levitate about six feet in the air within a narrow cylinder. Don’t worry: the frog participants 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.
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.
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.
