“These electrons pair up over distances that are larger than the scale at which they’d be hitting atoms,” Mason says. “So if you imagine a road that has a lot of bumps in it, [electron pairs] lift themselves up above the road … so that the bumps are irrelevant to them.”

Superconductors also have unique magnetic properties, as they naturally expel magnetic fields while simultaneously creating eddy currents of their own. This is what’s known as the “Meissner effect,” and it explains why levitation is often regarded as an effect of superconductivity (though it can be caused by other means).