The Meissner effect lets superconducting objects levitate, which is very cool. That it can enable levitation is a bit subtle, and involves flux pinning, which gets referenced in lots of places including this Stack Exchange post. But is there any simple way to estimate how much force the Meissner effect can exert, or how heavy of an object can be levitated?
I could imagine that this is a fairly hard thing to calculate if e.g. disorder is involved in pinning vortices. But even if there is a hand-wavey way to get an order of magnitude estimate in some particular scenario, that would be interesting. As long as one can say what physical and material properties go into the result.
