• Question: will there be hover boards in the future

    Asked by to Laurence on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      This is a very interesting question!
      Well, I’ve never been in the future, so I can’t tell for sure… But I know that there is a lot of interest for making this happen, so it’s definitely possible!

      Actually, they already exist, they are just not commercialized 🙂 A lot of people have made home-made/garage versions of hoverboards with skateboards and leafblowers. But my favourite version is using superconductors! This way, it’s actually possible to make something levitate!! A university in Paris presented the ‘Mag Surf’ in 2011. You can see it here (sorry, it’s French – it’s form a french university):

      The way it works is actually pretty simple. The rails are made of very strong magnets, and inside the board is a special material that start repealing very strongly all magnetic fields (in this case, the magnetic field form the magnets) once it’s cooled to low enough temperature (they use liquid nitrogen to cool it enough).

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