In 1999, American journalist Gail Collins wrote a newspaper article asking the question which was on the minds of many at that point in time – where’s my flying car?
During the 20th century, flying cars had become a staple of science fiction and pop culture, an oft-used caricature for what the future would hold. And yet, at the turn of the millennium, human beings were still firmly ground-bound, driving gas guzzlers over cracked roads and getting stuck in the winter. 20 years later, and smartphones have assuaged technological apprehension somewhat, but the question remains.
Here is the good news: flying cars, as well as a litany of other futuristic technology, previously seen only in the pages of science fiction, are closer than we can imagine. But it does not start with technological oligarchs or corporate innovation.
In fact, it starts with the secrets of sound.
Lost Ancient Knowledge of Levitation
For an answer, one might have to go further back into history, to the writings of the 10th-century Arab historian Abdul Hasan Al-Masudi. This was a man who spent his life traveling the globe, eventually writing a 30-volume history of the world based on his adventures.
In this work, Al-Masudi spoke in detail on Egypt, where he had spent much time and, in fact, where he had settled at the end of his journey. One section stands out as particularly relevant, where Al-Masudi explains how Egypt’s pyramids were built. Consider that even today, scientists do not have a concrete explanation for how the pyramids were built, how 2.5 million blocks of stone weighing 2.5 tonnes each were moved and stacked without modern machinery. Many have suggested that it must have taken tens of thousands of slaves, many decades moving stones by ropes and pulleys. But Al-Masudi offered a different explanation, one presumably directly from the mouths and the records of the Egyptians who had become his compatriots.
He described how, when they wanted to move stone, the ancient Egyptians would palace a piece of papyrus imprinted with unusual symbols under it. From there, they would strike a metal rod against the stone, at which point it would levitate off the ground. They would then guide the stone along a path, fenced with additional metal rods, until it fell, then repeat the process until the stone was in its desired place. In his book, Al-Masudi wrote:
“In carrying on the work, leaves of papyrus, or paper, inscribed with certain characters, were placed under the stones prepared in the quarries; and upon being struck, the blocks were moved at each time the distance of a bowshot (which would be a little over 200 feet), and so by degrees arrived at the pyramids.”
Hearing accounts like this draws attention to the numerous ancient structures on earth whose construction remains, like the pyramids, something of a mystery.
Think of Stonehenge, where the largest stones weigh 40 tonnes, or Easter Island, where the largest Moai is 80 tonnes. Consider the Nan Madol on the Island of Pohnpei in Micronesia, the ‘Machu Picchu of the Pacific,’ a lost city constructed in 200 BCE using hundreds of stone logs each 18 feet long and several feet in diameter, weighing 2.5 tonnes. Or what about the stone blocks at Baalbek in Lebanon, where the three biggest stones weigh an unbelievable 1000 tonnes each.
Baalbek Stone of the Pregnant Woman
Shockingly, these are not even the largest man-made stones on our planet. An incredible discovery made in Russia threatens to shatter conventional theories about the history of our planet. In Siberia, researchers have found a massive wall of granite stones. Many of these granite stones were estimated to weigh more than 3,000 tons, precisely cut with flat surfaces, sharp corners, and right angles. Nothing of this magnitude has ever been discovered before.
Even the largest, most powerful crane in existence today could not move these stones; so how did an ancient civilization? Further, why is it that “in almost every culture where megaliths exist, a legend also exists that huge stones were moved by acoustic means.”
Of course, some secrets of the past we may never know, forever the province of the ancients. Luckily, this is not a phenomenon that remains locked in the past.
Mystery of the Coral Castle
Edward Leedskalnin was born in 1877 in Riga, Latvia. When, in his early 20s, his fiancé broke off their engagement only days before the wedding, a heartbroken Leedskalnin left Latvia for North America, though there are some who have suggested he was fleeing the Tsar’s secret police after an armed uprising in 1905. Regardless, he bounced around Canada, California, and Texas for a while, before settling in the warm climate of Florida after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. There, he began his life’s work, his incredible ‘Rock Gate Park.’ This was a sprawling stone city made of more than 1000 tonnes of coral rock, stones weighing up to 35 tonnes each. Leedskalnin made walls and towers, one of which he lived in, furniture and art out of the coral. 
Curiously, Leedskalnin never let anyone watch him work, and many wondered how a 5-foot tall, 100-pound man with tuberculosis could have cut, shaped, lifted, and maneuvered all that rock into place by himself. Consider, in 1986, long after Leedskalnin’s death, the gate to the park, which by then had been renamed Coral Castle and become a major tourist attraction, broke, and it took six men with a 45-ton crane to fix it.
For his part, Leedskalnin never revealed his secrets, saying only that he knew how to tune to “the music of the stars,” and cryptically proclaiming “I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucutan and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons!”
During his life, a number of curious stories about Leedskalnin began to emerge. His neighbors reported that they had heard him singing to his coral, while a group of teenagers swore they had seen him “float coral blocks through the air like hydrogen balloons.” Additionally, after his death, a large stockpile of radio equipment was found deep within the castle, as well as a tightly sealed sound-proof room, which some have speculated could have been used for sound experiments.
Is it possible that the “secrets of the pyramids” of which Leedskalnin spoke were the same recorded by Al-Masudi?
Buddhist Knowledge of Acoustic Levitation
In our video about the powers and abilities of Buddhist monks, which was curiously deemed inappropriate or offensive, and also forcefully age-restricted by YouTube, we mentioned the story of a mysterious Swede known only as Dr. Jarl, who in the 1930s, reached the end of a long journey deep into the heart of Tibet, traveling first by plane, and then, in a yak caravan across the mountainous terrain, to a place few Westerners had ever been before. Years earlier, as a young man studying at Oxford University, Jarl had befriended a Tibetan student, with whom he had maintained a lifelong relationship. It was this friend who had asked him, begged him really, to come to Tibet, to treat a prominent Lama who had fallen ill.
An account of Jarl’s journey was published in a German magazine, detailing his time in Tibet and, most specifically, one extraordinary story.
According to Jarl, he was led one day to a meadow surrounded by high cliffs. On one of these cliffs, some 250 meters off the ground, was a cave and the beginnings of what appeared to be a rock wall the locals were building. But how, Jarl wondered, with no way up to the ledge except perhaps by climbing a rope? He noted with curiosity that sitting in the otherwise barren meadow was an enormous polished slab of rock with a bowl shape carved in the middle.
Suddenly a procession of monks appeared, carrying massive instruments – huge iron drums and 3-meter long horns. The monks used an ox to drag a substantial boulder onto the smooth slab of rock in the meadow, then set their instruments up around it and began to play, beating the iron drums with leather mallets and blowing their horns.
What followed shocked Jarl. As the account recorded:
“When the stone was in position, the monk behind the small drum gave a signal to start the concert. The small drum had a very sharp sound and could be heard even with the other instruments making a terrible din. All the monks were singing and chanting a prayer, slowly increasing the tempo of this unbelievable noise. During the first four minutes, nothing happened; then as the speed of the drumming, and the noise, increased, the big stone block started to rock and sway, and suddenly it took off into the air with an increasing speed in the direction of the platform in front of the cave hole 250 meters high. After three minutes of ascent, it landed on the platform.”
Amazed, Jarl watched the monks repeat this process over and over again, moving five or six boulders every hour as the rock wall slowly grew. He could not believe his own eyes, assuming he must have been hypnotized or drugged or otherwise fooled. So, he set up a camera to record the process. Watching it back later, he saw exactly what he thought he’d seen, boulder and boulder, levitated as if by magic.
Curiously, when Jarl returned to Europe, the scientific society which had sponsored his trip confiscated his videos, and they subsequently disappeared. Years later, the question remains: What was on those tapes? Was Jarl hypnotized or hallucinating? Or did these Tibetan monks possess some sort of secret knowledge that allowed them to hurl boulders through the air?
Was Leedskalnin’s “music of the stars” the same witnessed by Dr. Jarl in Tibet?
The Science behind Acoustic Levitation
Good news. These are not questions without answers, not questions relegated to the realm of myth and legend. In fact, they are now firmly in the arena of science.
It’s called acoustic levitation, that is when sound is used to counteract the force of gravity. Simply, when sound waves bounce off a surface, the interaction between the compressions and rarefactions created causes interference; occasionally, reflections and interference will combine to create what is called a standing wave. These are sound waves which appear to vibrate rather than traveling from place to place, hence standing wave. Crucially, when the orientation of a standing wave is parallel to the pull of gravity, the effect is levitation.
These standing waves can be created using an acoustic levitator, a device made up of a transducer – a vibrating surface that creates sound – and a reflector – the surface the waves will be reflecting off of. Think back to the monks described by Jarl. Their ‘transducer’ was the drums and horns; their reflector was the smooth slab of rock with its concave surface. Importantly, to achieve acoustic levitation, the transducer and reflector must be a precise distance apart, and the waves produced of a specific frequency. This was why Jarl’s monks used drums and horns of specific sizes, down to the centimeter, and why, as Jarl’s accounts described:
“The monks carefully measured the distance from the stone to this quarter-circle of instruments, and it came out to 63 meters. Eight of the thirteen drums were exactly the same size as the stone—a meter wide and a meter and a half long. Four of the drums were smaller in size, but were exactly one third the volume of the larger drum, at 0.7 meters wide and one meter long. One additional drum was the smallest, at 0.2 meters wide and 0.3 meters long—again in perfect harmonic proportion. You could fit 41 of the small drums into the medium drum, in volume, and 125 into the larger drum.”
Put succinctly by author Bruce Cathie:
“The secret is in the geometric placement of the musical instruments in relation to the stones to be levitated, and the harmonic tuning of the drums and trumpets.”
What this all means is that the science behind the levitating stones of Jarl and Al-Masudi is now well-established, so well-established, in fact, that modern scientists have started to take it much further than just moving stones.
Modern Research of Acoustic Levitation
In the early-2000s, scientists began to levitate small droplets of water with sound, a starry-eyed foray into the official study of acoustic levitation. Research plateaued however, when scientists could not figure out a way to move the particles once they were levitated. As one scientist described, if they pushed too hard, the water droplet would explode, not hard enough, it would fall with gravity.
Then, finally, in 2013, a team of researchers led by Dimos Poulikakos, a mechanical engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, had a stunning breakthrough. After four years of continuous effort, they created a system – a checkerboard-style setup with multiple vibrating plates, each generating its own frequency – which allowed them to “precisely control the lateral movement of liquid droplets while keeping them floating smoothly in midair.”
The researchers used their creation to move different droplets and particles towards each other until they coalesced into one. Cheekily, they mixed instant coffee and water. They were even able to spin a toothpick around, an object much larger than had previously been possible.
Before coming to this discovery, Poulikakos described the plight of scientists levitating droplets with acoustic levitation as, “like we had a car which we made fancier and fancier, but it stayed parked. We were never able to drive.” With his team’s discovery, scientists were able to, in effect, take this car out for a test drive. So where would they go, that is, what might be possible?
Applications of Acoustic Levitation
To start, many have suggested that this technology could have huge implications for the manufacturing sector – picture contactless production lines, goods produced, and moved, no matter how fragile, without ever being touched, without concern for contamination, no matter how hazardous the materials.
Further, this technology is beginning to get applied to the field of medicine. For example, a group of British researchers developed so-called “acoustic tweezers” which could be used to move cartilage cells from a petri dish and implant them in people who had sustained tendon or ligament damage, in effect, molding a string of cartilage cells into precisely the right shape inside a person’s body using sound. This might be applied to bones or even tissue, a new method of futuristic regeneration, one which moves beyond invasive surgery.
These are incredible applications in the fields of manufacturing and medicine, but in fact, it goes even further. One might say it boldly goes where no one has gone before.
In 2018, a group of researchers at Northwestern University began using acoustic levitation technology to create metamaterials, that is, materials that didn’t otherwise exist in nature. Much as Poulikakos and his team did with water and coffee, the Northwestern researchers would control and combine the properties of individual particles, assembling, in essence, any configuration they could imagine.
One such work of their imagination was to combine DNA with gold nanoparticles, creating an entirely new material which could, incredibly, bend incoming light around it, making it appear invisible. In other words, it appeared they had created the cloaking technology seen previously in the annals of Star Trek.
Elsewhere, that very same year, researchers at the University of Bristol discovered a way to lift larger objects with acoustic levitation. Previously, researchers had not been able to lift anything larger than the sound wave itself. Bristol researchers overcame this by creating a system of rapidly fluctuating acoustic vortices, that is, a series of tiny sound tornadoes, a “twister of loud sound surrounding an inner, and completely silent, core.” As described Physical Letters Review journal:
“When a sound field rotates in any direction, some of its spin carries over to affect the motion of the levitating object inside it, making such an object orbit faster and faster until it becomes out of control and the experiment fails. But by switching the direction of the spin back and forth at high speeds, balancing it through opposing forces, the researchers found the sound tornado it could hold an object stable. This let them make the tornado’s silent core even bigger, ultimately trapping a sphere just under an inch across. It’s the largest object ever stabilized by a tractor beam.”
By increasing the size of the core at the center of the tornado, larger objects could be lifted, in this case, a “sphere just under an inch across,” but, presumably, even human beings, which is why the invention has been dubbed an “acoustic tractor beam.” Indeed, one could imagine it being applied to lift a human off the ground.
Acoustic Levitation – The Future of Mankind?
But one might imagine it going beyond that, not as a tractor beam deployed from some floating ship, but as the power source of the ship itself. Consider that the records of many ancient civilizations, those who have built inexplicable structures of heavy stone, contain depictions of flying machines which “flew through the air with a melodious sound.” Consider the stereotypical depiction of the UFO in science fiction, a flying disk with a circle in the middle, appearing, at first glance, not entirely unlike the huge polished and concave rock of Jarl’s monks. Perhaps these flying machines were, in fact, acoustic levitation devices.
Where’s my flying car? It is not an entirely unreasonable question in a world where phones are smarter than humans, and billionaires shoot rockets to Mars. And yet, perhaps the flying cars, and many other pieces of technological wizardry seen only in science fiction, were here all along; perhaps we just needed to listen to the “music of the stars.”