Halloween Costumes Improved by Physics
How Physicists Can Make Spooky Holiday Witches and Ghosts Realistic
Oct 18, 2009
For the spooky Halloween holiday both kids planning to trick or treat and adults planning to attend Halloween parties like to dress up in Halloween costumes. Ghosts, witches, Harry Potter, and superheroes are all popular themes for Halloween costumes. Physics might someday make these costumes more realistic.
Witches, Harry Potter, and Flying Broomsticks
Witches and Harry Potter are popular Halloween costumes. Both of these characters like to fly on broomsticks, so a real flying broomstick would certainly make these costumes more realistic. Broomsticks however are not particularly aerodynamic, so flying broomsticks are a little hard to find. How might physics help design flying broomsticks?
In The Science of Harry Potter (Penguin, 2002) Roger Highfield discusses some ways that flying broomsticks could become a reality. They include:
- Winged broomsticks
- Rocket assisted broomsticks
- Antigravity
- Magnetic levitation.
A skilled engineer might be able to add wings and a propulsion system to a broomstick to make it fly. However it would more resemble Harry Potter or a witch straddling an airplane than a real flying broomstick. Therefore this approach would not be suitable for realistic Halloween costumes.
A rocket assisted flying broomstick would be difficult to control. It would have to be designed so that the end of the broom acted as a type of rudder system that steered the broomstick. Designing a rocket propulsion system that would fit in a standard size broomstick would also be difficult. Such a costume would be fun even if not particularly safe.
Electromagnetic forces are either attractive or repulsive. Gravity is only an attractive force. Until physicists find ways to make gravity a repulsive force, antigravity will remain speculative science fiction. If however anyone ever figures out a way to make antigravity work, the possibilities will extend way beyond flying broomsticks.
Magnetic forces can be either attractive or repulsive, so properly arranged magnets with opposite poles can suspend objects in midair. Engineers are working on using this magnetic levitation with superconducting magnets for high speed trains.
When engineers get the trains working well, they can turn their attention to the more important problem of realistic Halloween costumes. Broomsticks incorporating levitating magnets could be used to add realism to Halloween costumes for witches or Harry Potter on flying broomsticks. Levitating magnets could be sewed into the Halloween costumes for flying superheroes, such as superman. The superhero costumes could then include flying without the need for broomsticks.
Halloween Ghost Costumes
Ghosts are another popular theme for Halloween costumes. Popular depictions of ghosts are white shimmering barely visible creatures (Casper et al. 1963, ABC TV). Simple ghost costumes are made from a white bed sheet with eyeholes.
An imperfect invisibility device would provide the perfect shimmering effect for much more realistic ghost costumes. Optical physicists are working on the problem of invisibility. In a 2009 article in volume 102 of the journal Physical Review Letters Smolyaninov et al. describe work on optical invisibility cloaking. Using special materials, called metamaterials, they find that optical cloaking (invisibility) is possible for objects up to about 0.05 millimeters in size.
Without very extreme weight loss diets, that scale is still too small for Halloween costumes, but perhaps someday the technology will improve enough to cloak a person. Not quite perfect invisibility would be useful for shimmering Halloween ghost costumes. As demonstrated by Harry Potter, a perfect invisibility cloak would have many other applications.
Those who think that physics is a useless difficult subject should consider the important applications of physics to designing more realistic Halloween costumes.
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