Real Flying Carpets? Maybe, Says Harvard Professor
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It may not be big enough to carry Ali Baba or any of his 40 thieves, but a Harvard professor thinks he's figured out how to make a flying carpet.
Professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, an engineer who also holds positions in applied mathematics and biology, writes in Physical Review Letters that it would be possible to make a rippling sheet that could generate enough horizontal resistance to stay airborne.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The catch: The sheet couldn't be more than 4 inches long or a tenth of a millimeter thick. It would have to vibrate about 10 times per second, pushing itself through the air in a manner reminiscent of a manta ray moving through water.
In scientific terms: "As waves propagate along a flexible foil, they generate a fluid flow that leads to a pressure that lifts the foil, roughly balancing its weight," Mahadevan writes.
And that weight, as you can imagine, would be mighty small indeed. The forces needed to make a heavier carpet fly — heavy enough to carry an Arab street urchin — would be so enormous that "computations and scaling laws suggest it will remain in the magical, mystical and virtual realm," says Mahadevan.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}What do other scientists think of the idea?
"It's cute, it's charming," University of Chicago physicist Thomas A. Witten tells Nature News, who added that's he's impressed someone took a serious look at the idea.