• Question: Why havent magnetic hoverboards been created yet and how would people create this?

    Asked by saffadallas to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 9 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by Potato.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      It turned out being pretty hard to push human weight off the ground just using electromagnets the size of the hoverboard 🙂 I don’t think it’s super safe to have such strong magnets so close to your body either.

      We have some interesting ideas, like sound levitation, but again, it’s hard to put all that gear into such a compact size.

      We’ll need to sort out 2 problems to have hoverboards:
      1. Light, compact batteries storing lot’s of power (that’s why drones you can buy can’t fly for days and need a re-charge, for example).

      2. Being able to generate enough force to lift a person off the ground safely and in a stable manner. You can check out air and water jets for some inspiration, but take note of how bulky the equipment is, and how quickly novice riders lose balance and fall.

      Once this is sorted, and it doesn’t cost a fortune to build – I’m pretty sure someone will come up with hoverboards 🙂

    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 9 Mar 2017:

      I agree with Dmitry. It is quite difficult to find a solution and create something that is not big and can hold our weight. However, I don’t think the idea of hoverboards is that good, imagine the number of accidents that might happen. We can barely use something that has wheels, let along someone that flies.

    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      That is a good questions.

      Why don’t you become and engineer, invent them and become a really famous inventor like Elon Musk?

      You could create a hoverboard out of drones? so using lots of tiny helicopters rather than magnets.

      There is such as thing as quantum locking, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXHczjOg06w , which could allow you to levitate on a track, like in Ratchet and Clank games, but you need to keep it very cold so maybe you could invent a way to do that?

      Siobhan

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