Probably everyone here knows this already, but: It doesn’t. That video is a viral advertisement for a computer game.
[EDITED to add:] Ooops, excuse me. I jumped to conclusions about what video it was without actually checking. My claim above is bullshit. There is a famous Youtube video showing “quantum levitation” that’s a totally fake viral advertisement, but that isn’t it, and to the best of my knowledge everything in the video vallinder linked to is genuine.
Many apologies.
(If anyone’s feeling public-spirited, I would suggest downvoting my comment to −2 or thereabouts, perhaps after waiting a few hours so that those who read my original comment have a chance to see the retraction. And no, the foregoing is not motivated by an expectation that without such an invitation I’ll get downvoted more and sooner :-).)
The stuff shown in the video is totally possible. So there’s this stuff called the Meissner effect, which is where magnets can float above superconductors. They do this because superconductivity is more than just zero electrical resistance—a flowing ring of current is actually the ground state of a superconductor in a magnetic field, and that ring of current provides the magnetic field to hold the magnet up.
Probably everyone here knows this already, but: It doesn’t. That video is a viral advertisement for a computer game.
[EDITED to add:] Ooops, excuse me. I jumped to conclusions about what video it was without actually checking. My claim above is bullshit. There is a famous Youtube video showing “quantum levitation” that’s a totally fake viral advertisement, but that isn’t it, and to the best of my knowledge everything in the video vallinder linked to is genuine.
Many apologies.
(If anyone’s feeling public-spirited, I would suggest downvoting my comment to −2 or thereabouts, perhaps after waiting a few hours so that those who read my original comment have a chance to see the retraction. And no, the foregoing is not motivated by an expectation that without such an invitation I’ll get downvoted more and sooner :-).)
The stuff shown in the video is totally possible. So there’s this stuff called the Meissner effect, which is where magnets can float above superconductors. They do this because superconductivity is more than just zero electrical resistance—a flowing ring of current is actually the ground state of a superconductor in a magnetic field, and that ring of current provides the magnetic field to hold the magnet up.
The linked video is legit, afaik. There is another recent video of a quantum levitation-based Wipeout track that is fake.