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The new Harry Potter film hits theaters today, and it got me wondering whether it's possible, using current technology, to make a broomstick fly. I hit the interwebs to find out.
Jet engines are too bulky to fit on a broomstick, and probably don't accelerate quite fast enough to zip you off the ground from a standstill. The equipment that operates maglev trains could do the trick, but your travels would be confined to a track. Scientists have used an electrostatic chamber to levitate globs of metal, and an acoustic field to levitate mice, but neither of those options would seem to apply here. One flying broomstick message board I came across suggested manipulating the fourth dimension's magnetic flux, which he called hyperflux, but I don't know how feasible an option that is.
