Flying Magic Carpets To Become Reality?

A graduate student at Princeton University, who got inspired from the work of an Indian-origin scientist, has created a flying carpet. The miniature magic carpet made of plastic has taken flight in a laboratory at the University, the BBC reported. The 10cm sheet of smarttransparency is driven by "ripple power"; waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front to rear underneath. The prototype, described in Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of about a centimetre per second, but it is believed that further improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a metre per second. Noah Jafferis, the device's creator, revealed that he was inspired by a mathematical paper authored by Harvard University's Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan.  Mahadevan, who wrote the 2007 paper in Physical Review Letters that inspired the whole project, expressed a mixture of surprise and delight at the Princeton team's success. Noah has gone beyond our simple theory and actually built a device that works. And what's more, it behaves, at least qualitatively, as we had predicted," he told the BBC.