Furen wrote:I recall watching HouseholdHacker do a similar project for hover shoes, though, people discredit it, (and there's very good reasons people dispute this) at least the shoes float. (
Source)
Wow that is incredibly unrealistic... laughably so.
An electromagnet with 50 pounds of lift would do some INCREDIBLY unsafe things the moment it was powered in proximity to a similarly powered magnet, and man alive would hot glue not be capable of keeping those things in place. Anyone who's handled magnets will be hammering their heads on a desk when they realize anyone thinks that's real.
I've worked with very small neodymium magnets that top out at less than a pound of supporting ability and the fields on said magnets have been capable of pulling them across the table from several inches away. Multiplied by 50+ (and I am generalizing here, not doing the math for the scale of the electromagnetic field and force, if you feel like doing the physics to disprove this be my guest) said magnets could attract from many feet away. To each other. Given that magnetic fields are not straight lines up and down from a magnet but actually have a round field that varies on the poles (and a shockingly small neutral zone), stability is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve with two magnets in close proximity.
So what would happen in reality?
0. Absolute best case, guy falls on his rear because you can't balance a magnetic field like that. Nothing else happens.
1. Best case scenario, they all rip off the shoes, tear out the wires and become inert. Possibly while wiping your credit cards of their data as you fall on a mass of magnets before they all deactivate.
2. Worst case scenario, the fields are aligned by a minor slip of a foot and the magnets on one shoe are yanked over the other magnets, with foot still attached and sandwich a foot between 4 strong magnets. A demonstration of what this could feel like involves dropping a 100# metal plate on your foot. I don't advise that.
Oh and by the way, to get lift with a magnet, the object you're pushing off of must be magnetized with an
opposing field as well. A metal beam in your house will be, quite deliberately NOT MAGNETIZED as it would wreck havoc on things like the computer in your car... the wiring in your house... etc. So presuming these could generate the 50# of force as stated, they wouldn't make you float. They'd bond you to the beam. With 100 pounds of combined force per leg. Until you turned them off. Even if it was you'd have a vaguely 50% chance of it aligning to your shoes if you didn't calculate the field before hand.
So no... the shoes don't float.