A team of students at the University of Leicester in Leicester, England have demonstrated that it is conceptually attainable to create a pair of battery-powered trousers, which would give the wearer the ability to defy gravity – stroll down the Burj Khalifa or on the your living room ceilings.
To attain this, it implies creating a device/single boot that can function supporting the entire weight of both the wearer and the device itself. The group of students is currently working on calculations where this would be deemed as possible.
Leicester Students Are Developing Anti-Gravity Trousers
As per the design, each boot would have a slightly raised rubber insulator embedded on the edge of the sole. This would thus create a cavity when the wearer sets its foot on the insulator surface. By applying a vacuum to the area of the cavity, the boot will be able to stick firmly to the surface of the wall – it functions quite similar to a suction cup, but with much more firm control.
By means of various calculations, the students concluded that the vacuum generator in would need to abate the air pressure below the boot by nearly 18.5 kPa in comparison to the surrounding environment. The 18.5 kPa figure is the vacuum that is created by an ordinary vacuum cleaner.
World’s First Anti-Gravity Trousers
Currently, one chief problem with creating anti-gravity trousers revolves around creating a vacuum that is enough to power the trousers efficiently. Due to weight constraints, the team calculated that realistically the trousers will be powered for only 20 minutes before its battery is drained. An alternative for this could be to draw power directly from the grid, although this would restrain movement.
Since the device depends heavily on creating a lower pressure than the surrounding environment, the trousers unfortunately won’t work in outer space. For outer space use, the trousers can be fitted with magnetic generators instead of vacuum generators.
The groundbreaking work was published in the Journal of Physics Special Topics.
