© Lambert/Getty Images
That song from Aladdin -- A Whole New World -- is a sneaky ditty. Just when you think you've managed to rid your head of its infectious melody, it has a funny way of skimming the clouds of memory and floating back into your consciousness.
Especially when Princeton University graduate student Noah Jafferis just developed a flying carpet that is neither animated, nor fictional. But you do have to stretch your imagination a little bit. The fully functional, miniature carpet is actually a 4-inch sheet of plastic, but the technology it employs is anything but exaggerated.
Jafferis' prototype "flies" using waves of electrical currents to drive thin pockets of air above a flat surface, but it won't be soaring and darting over palace kingdoms anytime soon. In fact, currently it can only travel at speeds of around one centimeter per second.
Professor James Sturm, lab leader of Jafferis' research team, told the BBC the "flying carpet" faces many challenges.
"What was difficult was controlling the precise behavior of the sheet as it deformed at high frequencies," he said. "Without the ability to predict the exact way it would flex, we couldn't feed in the right electrical currents to get the propulsion to work properly."
Jafferis, Sturm and colleague Howard Stone recently published a paper on their project in Applied Physics Letters. In it, the team compare their magic carpet to a hovercraft.
"It has to keep close to the ground," Jafferis explained to the BBC's Science in Action, "because the air is then trapped between the sheet and the ground. As the waves move along the sheet it basically pumps the air out the back. That is the source of the thrust."
So for now, all your magic carpet rides will have to exist in dreams. But that's not a bad thing. After all, fantasy will set you free.
Reader Comments