The Floating Magnet Explained: How Superconductors Make Levitation Possible
Magnets have always seemed magical to me. They pull and push but don’t move themselves, yet the world rearranges itself around it, nothing moves, yet everything responds. Almost like the charm of people, magnetism changes everything.
This experiment took place in a superconductivity lab at Tel Aviv University, where physicist Professor Guy Deutscher and his team were working with extreme cold and super strong magnets (almost as strong as my husband Zakary Edington).
They started with a small ceramic disk made of a material called yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO). On its own, it’s totally unremarkable, just like normal ceramics. However, when the researchers flooded it with liquid nitrogen and dropping its temperature to about –321°F (–196°C, nice and chilly-chilly), the ceramic’s behavior changed completely.
At that temperature, the material became a superconductor. Cue Superman theme song here.
In this state, the ceramic does something most solids don’t, it refuses to let magnetic fields pass through it. Magnetism can exist around it, but not inside it. The material pushes the magnetic field outward, forcing it to wrap around the surface instead. The inside of it becomes almost magnet-free.
This magical thing is called the Meissner effect, but the result is way easier to understand than the name (which I’ve struggled to pronounce in real life), the superconductor acts like a shield against magnetism. When the researchers placed a strong permanent magnet above the frozen ceramic, gravity tried to pull the magnet down, but magnetism pushed back. The two forces balanced themselves out and the magnet stopped falling. We use things like this to our advantage for cool items like this floating plant pot.
It hovered…just suspended in midair.
Because the ceramic isn’t perfectly smooth at the microscopic level, parts of the magnetic field became locked in place inside tiny flaws in the material. This phenomenon, known to the interwebs as flux pinning, is what made the levitation so stable. The magnet could be tilted, or nudged, or even inverted, but it stayed exactly where it was.
The math is mathing, but for some reason, watching a solid object float motionless in space, supported by nothing you can see, feels like watching the universe briefly forget one of its own habits.
Not Your Average Physics Party Trick
We’ve seen magnetic levitation before, of course, so I know what you’re thinking. Trains in Japan and China hover above their tracks using powerful electromagnetic systems and classrooms demonstrate floating magnets ad nauseam. I’ve even seen some desk toys that use magnetic repulsion to create the illusion of weightlessness. When it looks super common, you’re probably like, okaaay, why are you going on about this cold magnet thing for so long?
This is different though, I swear.
What makes superconducting levitation so strange isn’t that the magnet floats, it’s how it floats. Most levitation systems rely on constant feedback and adjustment, fine-tuning currents in real time to keep an object from falling or flying away. Remove the power, and the levitation fails, and your object goes crashing to the ground, a victim to gravity once again.
In a superconducting system, there’s no such active balancing act.
Once the material is cooled and the magnetic fields lock into place, the magnet becomes passively stable. It doesn’t need correction or drift off to once side when the breeze blows, it doesn’t wobble or weeble anywhere. Its position is fixed by the geometry of invisible magnetic fields frozen into the superconductor itself.
In other words, the magnet isn’t floating freely, it’s anchored in space without any kind of contact, held in place by forces you can’t see but can’t escape. That stability is what unsettles me (and others I’m sure).
It looks less like a trick of engineering and more like the magnet has found a natural resting place in empty space, a place defined by the structure of the surrounding field, not by gravity or support from anything else.
No new forces are involved and no laws of physics are broken, but yet, when something behaves so calmly in a situation where our intuition expects chaos, the effect feels cosmic. To me, it carries the same unease as other great mysteries in physics because it reminds us how much of reality operates beyond everyday experience.
Science at Home
If you're curious about magnetic levitation and want to witness the basics of this effect at home, this Levitating Magnetic Display Stand with a working lightbulb on it is a great conversation piece and science teaching tool. It won’t break the laws of physics, but it might inspire you to ask new questions.
Watching that magnet hover doesn’t make me question physics, instead it makes me question my instincts.
We’re taught to trust what looks solid (even though nothing is really solid at all), what touches what and what supports something else. The thing is though, the universe clearly doesn’t work that way. It’s stitched together by invisible relationships we can’t see even a little bit, forces that don’t always show themselves, but quietly do the work anyway.
The magnet floats because it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be.
That’s the unsettling part for me, realizing how often things in this world are held in place by systems we barely notice until something decides to hover instead of fall.
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