There’s something you don’t see every day – a levitating frog. And no, for those of you old enough to remember, it’s nothing to do with Miss Piggy sending Kermit into a horizontal trajectory with one of her infamous karate kicks.
2000’s winner of the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics, Andre Geim, created a powerful magnetic field in which the atoms inside a doubtless bemused but unharmed frog were made to act as billions of tiny little magnets. Applying the popular science classroom principle of like poles repelling, the ‘magnetised’ frog was then repelled by a similarly charged force at the base of an electromagnet, effectively compensating the force of gravity.
Why use a frog for this groundbreaking demonstration of the nearest thing to an antigravity machine we’ll probably ever see? Because our spring-heeled, poppy-eyed friends have a high water content and water is a good ‘diamagnetic’ material, which basically means it’s good at being repelled by magnetic fields. A bit like copper is a good conductor. Or our Technical Analysts are good at channelling clients’ eligible activity into successful R&D tax credit claims. We’re going to need a much bigger magnet to levitate one of them though.
