A live frog levitating in a 16-tesla Bitter solenoid, Nijmegen

1997

The famous photograph of a live frog floating inside the 32 mm vertical bore of a Bitter solenoid at about 16 tesla, at the High Field Magnet Laboratory in Nijmegen. Andre Geim and Michael Berry were levitating the water in the animal's own tissue - every ordinary substance is weakly diamagnetic, and a strong enough field gradient can hold it against gravity. The frog was unharmed, and it won Geim and Berry the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.