The Future of Levitation: The Levitation Ray

Craig: so researchers have used lasers to create a real life levitation ray. so now they're levitating things with lasers. what's happening here, john?

Jon: yeah, with fricking lasers. so this is out of the university of sao paulo, brazil. shout out to bgr dot com for this article. thank you for this. they've developed a groundbreaking tractor beam technology, tractor beam in quotes, okay, which uses lasers to levitate and manipulate small objects. so it was published in optics express, and this represents an advancement in the field of optical manipulation and has potential applications across various scientific disciplines. now just to get into it, how the laser system works, it uses a phenomenon called photophoresis, which i think we talked about before, where light heats one side of an object more than the other, which creates a force that can lift and move the object. so the technique overcomes limitations of traditional optical tweezers, which i think that's what we talked about, maybe not, which typically work on only microscopic particles. so there have been similar research that is being conducted at other institutions where scientists have developed acoustic levitation techniques, but the development of this technology, it aligns with broader trends in non contact manipulation methods, which have implications such as in the field of microfluids and space exploration. what are your thoughts?

Craig: well, we talked about this back in episode one hundred fifty two when we were talking about tractor beam technology. yes, in the end, the example in sciences we're using laser tweezers. and so it's cool that we're now moving beyond a laser tweezer type implementation into something that's a little bigger.

Jon: yeah, this is cool. this is great because now you can push, lift or pull, if that makes sense. so the way that it does is they carefully shape the laser beams using a spatial light modulator and then create precise patterns of light that generate controllable forces on the target object. so it allows for manipulations of objects much larger than what's possible with traditional optical tweezers, what you talked about. so this is really cool. how close are we to back to the future type levitating skateboards?

Craig: well, we'll see. this is apparently not just a trick. it's a gateway to redefining industries from healthcare to transportation. delivering drugs directly to specific cells, manufacturing, handling fragile materials like microchips without contamination and space exploration, simulating zero gravity environments to test equipment. however, know, sci fi meets reality. okay, silent drones, maybe levitating ray powered drones could replace noisy propeller drones, floating infrastructure, buildings suspended above earthquake prone zones, quantum computing using levitated particles for ultra precise quantum experiments. i don't think we're gonna see levitating skateboards with these, but, you know

Jon: i wanted to tell hoverboard, damn it. hey. if you can levitate a drone, come on. you gotta be able to levitate board with someone on it eventually. who knows?

Craig: yeah. but the idea of levitating a drone usually means military versus consumer. so i'm thinking, you know, i'm not running down to my local walmart or canadian tire picking up a hoverboard anytime soon.

Jon: no. no. that's true.

Craig: now having said that, we've seen the military, those water ones and the hover drones and stuff where they have people on them that they've used. yeah. so it might be closer than we think.

Jon: yeah, who knows? obviously, this technology is going to be used in government first and then maybe eventually we'll get down to us peons down here, but this is really cool. i love that there is a continuation from what we covered before to now with photopheresis, which is really cool. yeah.

Craig: yeah. and this is likely decades away, but smaller applications like medical devices are already here as we move forward. it's currently safe in environments, but this is high energy, right? so we've got to figure out how to get it to a different state if we want to use it outside of very lab intensive environments. yeah. different than maglev because maglev uses magnetic fields while levitation rays uses light or sound. it'd be interesting if there are some combination of those in the future.

Jon: yeah, that would be cool. yeah, know. we haven't really talked about meglev technology in a while because i don't know if there's been much development. know there's some meglev trains that are being built in asia, yeah, it'd be interesting to see how this could integrate and become a hybrid kind of technology, but who knows? who knows? there's so many implications that we're not even covering that this could help.

Craig: i didn't look at justin trudeau's announcement of the high speed rail that he's trying to do. so i don't know what that's, if that's traditional rail or some sort of maglev introduction, but that was a big announcement soon. but i'm excited because, yeah, we're scaling up these implementations. you think about elon musk wants to go to mars in twenty or thirty years, people think it's crazy and hate him and love him and whatever. but let's just say it's forty years instead of thirty years. and that we're moving these things along with tractor beams and levitation rays and all the things we've been talking about. majorama not majorama. not the electrons, but

Jon: oh, the magnons.

Craig: magnons. sorry, too many magnets. computers that may or may not be more effective in spaces and exam. there's leaps and bounds and having ai and quantum computers potentially onboard a space vehicle that's traveling back and forth to mars, all of a sudden a lot of things become more possible than before. we talked about the mobile nukes and the solar sails and all that stuff that would allow this type of stuff to happen. we're generally moving towards a very interesting human species that might be space travelers. yeah. so let us know what you think. is levitation ray just a gimmick and we're not going to get past tweezers? is this part of the future moving towards space travel and, you know, we'll be now moving stuff around in construction yards with lasers and lights at some point in the future? let us know, what you think.

Jon: yeah.