Richard Webb, features editor
SINCE 2004, visitors to Shanghai, China, have been able to take a train that whisks them at over 400 kilometres an hour from Pudong International Airport to the city centre using the smooth glide of magnetic levitation.
The idea of using the repulsion between the like poles of magnets for high-speed, levitating transport has been floating around for the best part of a century but commercially successful implementations remain thin on the ground. A maglev people-mover that whirled passengers around Birmingham International Airport in the UK in the 1980s was prone to failure, eventually being ignominiously replaced by a more conventional cable-guided system.
James Livingston, formerly of General Electric and MIT, is an informed guide through such historical highways and byways. The fascination magnetic levitation exerts is illustrated by such characters as Andre Geim, a 2010 physics Nobelist who achieved notoriety in 2000 for successfully using diamagnetic forces to levitate a frog. That's undoubtedly fun, but will maglev ever reach the commercial heights Livingston hopes? That's still up in the air.
Rising Force: The magic of magnetic levitation
by James D. Livingston
Harvard University Press