And I thought about this child's toy hence, the title of my talk and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there.

How can a super thin, three inch disk levitate something 70,000 times its own weight? In a riveting, futuristic demonstration, Boaz Almog shows how a phenomenon known as quantum locking allows a superconductor disk to float over a magnetic rail completely frictionlessly and with zero energy loss.

See also Acoustic tweezers Optical levitation Radiation pressure Electrostatic levitation Magnetic levitation Aerodynamic levitation Buoyancy References External links McGraw Hill AccessScience Acoustic radiation pressure A Multi Transducer Near Field Acoustic Levitation System for Noncontact Transportation of Large Sized Planar Objects Live Science Scientists Levitate Small Animals

You can violate your expectations about experience. Here is an outside water fountain that I created with some friends of mine, but you can stop the water in drops and actually make all the drops levitate. This is something we're building for, you know, amusement parks and that kind of stuff.