http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=3004
Okay so it can only manipulate and pull objects up to 100 times the size of a bacterium and pushes an object rather than pulls, but it works.
Even if it only gets to working to suspend people for instance it would provide some rather interesting stage shows among other possibilities.
only works by warming air. Guess wouldn’t help beaming a Klingon ship in empty space…
What is the practicality of that in real life?
what is the practicality of putting kites to fly in a stormy weather with a key attached to it? Must be some moron with too much time in the hands…
well, it could have some uses someday… dunno what though, I can only think of ships 
Aww… I was hoping it would have something to do with flinging heavy farm equipment long distances… get it? A TRACTOR beam???
lol, that would probably have been even better if you hadn’t explained it, LazyCoder 
made me laugh though.
I wonder how a tractor beam like in Star Wars would actually work… electromagnetic fields limited to a beam? considering ships are made of metal (ships like the Millennium Falcon or similar) it could maybe work, though I don’t know how you’d limit electromagnetic fields to a beam 
Nah, perhaps it could induce a focused gravity well along a controlled pole by creating a near infinite mass on the inducing end. The hurdles though would be the immense electrical currents to do this and some way to allow electrons to flow through ether. :spin:
I’m a dork, thanks for noticing.
Cool article by the way.
it would probably work on the Death Star, consider how much energy they need to blow up a planet :eyebrowlift: or maybe they use Chaos Emeralds, that could work
they must use electromagnetic forces somewhere, infinite mass would mean infinite gravitational pull, which would create a black hole…
Randy
Bacteria are actually already pretty large… 100x the size of a bacterium is pretty huge, in quantum scale 
However, I guess, heating something up isn’t quite a quantum action. In fact, the definition of heat is the average undirected (=random) velocity of a group of particles. This average becomes very unreliable if you talk about just a few particles and it falls apart if you talk about a single particle. - It’s very difficult to extend ideas of heat to quantom mechanic. It’s probably the average deviation of the most certain path of a given particle-wave-dual or something like that…
Oh well, not quite the topic, huh? - That Tractor beam, working with heat, is far away from what scifi would call one. - It should work by at least controlling one of the four fundamental forces locally…
For electromagnetic fields, we have pretty good controls already, via electromagnets, arranged in special ways and such. The three other forces, weak and strong interaction and gravity, are pretty much impossible to affect directly by any simple approach. Gravity because it’s so incredibly weak (compared to the others) and weak and strong interaction because they work on the molecule and atom level…
I somewhere read, though, that an experiment which involved a rapidly spinning superconductor at low temperatures, somehow unexpectedly affected gravity. - it was only a single article, so I’m not sure how reliable it is… and I doubt, I could find it now.
Hello Tractor-Beam
@revolt_randy - thanks for that video!
aren’t trebuchets just awesome? 
lol, too bad they didn’t say how far the pianos and car flew…would’ve been interesting to know.