Hoverboard?

Honestly, this whole promise of hoverboards has been going on for so long that I’ve given up hope on ever seeing one in my lifetime. Since the days of Marty Mcfly the world has wanted to defy the laws of physics (and play a mean Johnny B. Goode solo) with a board that makes no contact with the ground yet still rides like skateboard. Well, as usual, science has the answer. MagSurf, built by researchers at Universite Paris Diderot in France, takes advantage of one of those strange physical phenomenon known as the Meisnner effect. When you take a superconductor and cool it to supercool temperatures (say with liquid nitrogen), the magnetic field lines that once went through the superconductor now “avoid” it, not passing through it but actually around it. So when you expose this superconductor to magnets it becomes “locked in space”, only moving when you apply a force to it. So how does this translate to a hoverboard? Well the researchers supercooled a platform (the “board”) and laid down a roll of permanent magnets so that the two repelled each other (the “hover”) and ended up with a system that looked more like a Maglev train than a Back to the Future prop. Even though the technology for a hoverboard isn’t completely ready yet (there has to be magnets or else there’s no levitation) I’m an impatient man, so I call for complete reform of our current transportation system. Instead of cars and buses and streets and highways we can just lay down miles of permanent magnets and just hover to work. You know what, that would still take too long to construct, where’s that DeLorean so I don’t have to spend another second not levitating everywhere. So just to review, what happens when you supercool a superconductor? You get a super cool hoverboard.