Marestream Physics, Antigravity, and Magnetic Levitation · 5:34pm Dec 11th, 2022
First impression of the Marestream: They’ve got a rainbow-powered spaceship horsebox! How cool is that!
Now having appreciated it in a child-opening-a-present sort of way, let’s examine it in a more academic-fan-overanalysis sort of way.
The Marestream is a rather retro vision of the future. It looks a bit like the sort of thing comic book writers in the 1950s thought we would be riding in 2022. A dream from a time when you could imagine flying cars without having to worry about the climate emergency, particulate pollution, and where to find a parking space.
These days, the idea comes with reservations. Converting a public tramcar to a private jet to let your friends whiz around the world is not exactly model-social-responsibility behaviour. Even allowing for the fact that Prisbeam drives are zero-emission vehicles, powered by 100% renewable pony friendships. If you want to make magic available to everypony, then what will you do when they all want marestreams and you can’t move through Maretime Bay because they’re parked bumper to bumper along the seafront? Posey might have something to say about it.
But that’s a story for another season. Right now, it’s the holiday, and time to let our ponies play with their new toy.
And I get to talk about physics. What kind of magic-enhanced phenomena makes this beauty fly? It doesn’t look like those wings are to provide lift through differential air pressure. Messing with the density of Equestrian air as we did when speculating about Pegasus flight doesn’t feel retro sci-fi enough for the Marestream. I think we need to go for something cooler: antigravity.
Antigravity is usually magic with more technobabble. It is something you can imagine. If you’ve completed enough high school physics, you will know the electrostatic force can be both attractive and repulsive. Opposite electrical charges (positive and negative) attract one another. Like charges repel. Gravity, as we know it, is always attractive, but if you could create such a thing as negative mass, then the maths says it would repel positive mass.
Unfortunately, negative mass is not a real thing, and there is no plausible theory to explain how it might exist, or experimental sign that it does.
Experiments have been done. There are tests going on at the CERN Antimatter Factory, such as the AEgIS experiment, studying how antiatoms respond to gravity. No one expects to see to see antimatter fall upwards, although a direct test of this has not yet been done. A slight difference in the gravitational acceleration of antiparticles could provides clues about quantum gravity and the matter-antimatter symmetry of the universe.
However, antimatter would not be a very practical material to make your flying bus as when it meets matter it annihilates, releasing the full E=mc2 amount of energy.
Maybe expecting antigravity to be a magical ability to reverse gravity is too demanding. An alternative definition is anything that counters the force of gravity. With this logic I am currently using an antigravity device to overcome my downwards acceleration and let my body remain above floor thanks to a reactive force it provides. This antigravity device is called a chair.
But office furniture doesn’t meet the necessary coolness requirement. Let’s look at another option—magnetic levitation.
If anyone gets a Fun With Magnets science kit for Wishday then you will soon learn that opposite poles of a magnet (North and South) attract, while alike poles repel. You can use this force to push magnets around a table top and you will find they tend to just spin around to the opposite pole. You can’t make a levitation device just using ordinary magnets (Earnshaw’s theorem).
But there are other ways. Before he became even more famous as the inventor of wonder-material graphene, Andrei Geim was known as the physicist who levitated a frog. He reasoned that almost anything can be levitated in a large enough magnetic field, as almost all materials are weak diamagnets, in which the applied field induces a magnetism that opposes it (unlike paramagnetic and ferromagnetic materials where the induced field aligns with the applied field and creates attraction). After demonstrating this with water, he borrowed a frog from the biology department, and showed it could levitate comfortably inside a 16T magnet. He says: “This is, in fact, as close as we can - probably ever - approach the science-fiction antigravity machine.”
Unfortunately, the field required to levitate anything heavier than a frog would need a far bigger magnet than anything currently available, and would involve some serious risks, such as being hit by flying nails.
The coolest real-world levitating vehicle is probably the Japanese SCMaglev train, which uses a high magnetic field generated by superconducting magnets to induce a current in guideway coils so once the train is moving fast enough, it levitates 100mm above the track—not quite at the level of the Marestream, but it is able to carry rather more passengers.
Maglev trains have promised to be the transport of the future since the 1980s. They have set some impressive speed records on test tracks, but sadly the investment has never been there to build anything longer than airport shuttle services. Let’s hope the Japanese can finish building their Tokyo-Nagoya line, and we will see more in the future, as the world really needs more cool high-speed levitating transport.
Im hoping that for actually doing the equivalent of close ground hover vehicles, that multifrequency acoustic levitation could be one of the valid methods, given how much success seems to have been occuring with that research recently. Mid air stuff, we, you could consider acoustic, but to set up the resonant boyuncy field for efficincy, youd have to be looking at abusing Boeing claim to focused shock pulse blast wave disruption patents?
My current favourite is that the quantum entangled communication simulated negative energy keeping wrmholes open causes negative field strengths, that is, that which could be called antigravity in Darkstein?
As for the vehicle. I wondered where the flying tramcar got to at the end of the origional Digimon series.
Can confirm.
thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/creative-d-illustration-character-rocket-chair-123965900.jpg
On a more serious note, I wonder if the future for levitating maglev trains might ironically be underground, in a sort of hyper-subway system? Unlike above ground, you have total control of the internal environment of the tube, so magnetic levitation might be more feasible with more axes of origin to work with. Plus it's insulated from air friction and debris, so long as you could pump air in and out of exit chambers for the passengers' sake.
It'd need a metric ton of money, though, to add that infrastructure. And it kinda defeats the purpose of levitation technology, so its only advantage to conventional subway transport would be greater speed and hence possibly range.
5702747
Yes - look up the SwissMetro proposal.
Technically speaking, the anti-gravity mechanism keeping your body above the floor is the Pauli exclusion principle. Same thing keeps you from falling through the floor. Ain't physics fascinating?
5702761
Indeed. Antigravity is quantum in nature.
5702766 I'm still a fan of gravity as a particle. As we get older, our ability to capture these particles goes up, so it is harder to get out of chairs, beds, etc... Our digestive systems get more efficient also, able to get 2,000 calories a day out of cardboard and wheat straw while still adding weight around the middle. Also, mental radiation kills hair cells, which is proven by my expanding forehead as I age and get smarter.
The Marestream is very, very silly, but it also totally fits G5. Especially the TYT version!
5702771
Quantumwack-particle duality. Simple as!
"Oh, look, the ponies have space ships now!"
I find their camper campy as heck, but that seems to be the way of this new generation.
The Marestream is probably a pun and design "borrow" from the mid-century Airstream trailers that are undergoing a revival in the US:
cdn.airstream.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Flying-Cloud-25-Twin-Exterior-Bug-Eye.png?auto=true&crop=edges&fit=clamp&ixlib=imgixjs-3.4.0&w=1246
5703554
That will be it. Not the kind of caravan you see very much on this side of the Atlantic. Looks like it would be easier to fit five ponies in there than in a VW camper.
5703919
Oh yeah, those suckers are huge!
I had to work my arse off, so only now just noticed thi.
I watched Avatar 2. The Way Of Water. It takes place on Pandora, a moon of Polyphemus, orbiting Alpha Centauri A in the Alpha Centauri Star System. Pandora has a mineral called Unattainium which is a room-temperature superconductor. Pandora has so much of it that whole floating mountains of it exist, magnetically pinned in midair. The SkyDæmons consider it so valuable that the come all the way from their dying planet in the SolStarSystem, just to get Unattaninium.
5706359
Yes, Avatar is very good at making things that sound like plausible science, while not letting the limitations of reality get in the way of a good story. A room temperature superconductor could indeed give rise to floating mountains in a large magnetic field. The field would be larger than that of any normal planet, but of course Pandora is no ordinary planet.
5706396
We know that the mass of Pandora is about 10^24 kg or a ⅙th the mass of Earth. It has an unusually strong magnetic field. The gravitational acceleration at its surface is about 6 m/s^2 (⅗th that of Earth). It is more massive than all of the other moons of Polyphemus combined. Polyphemus has a mass of 10^27 KG, which is similar to Saturn. Its atmosphere is about 3/2 Bars or like that of Titan. Its air-density is 3 kg/m^3, well over twice that of Earth due to the dense gases of Co2 and Xenon increasing its density. Its atmosphere contains far more O2 for powering muscles, but the high Xenon, CO2, and H2S make it toxic to humans. Its low gravity and dense atmosphere make flight 4X easier.
1 of the blogs I follow is that of Engineer Joseph Shör. Some of his research on magnetic pinning ended up in Avatar (originsally, it was for keeping things together in orbit without physically attaching them). This is his blog:
The Blog Of Engineer Joseph Shör
A BlogPost about his research into magnetic pinning:
MOVIES, RESEARCH, SCIENCE, SCIENCE FICTION
MY RESEARCH APPEARS IN ‘AVATAR!’
8 JANUARY 2010 26 COMMENTS