Reminds me of the time I turned myself into a Van de Graff generator at work.
I was a theater projectionist, back when you had 20 minute reels you had to constantly change, while babysitting two high-voltage, water-cooled, carbon arc projectors. Sometimes the film would break and you’d have to splice it. So when the theater got a print in, you had to count and log the number of splices for each reel, then the next theater would do the same and retire the print when it got too spliced up (plus, sometimes if it was the last night of a run, some lazy projectionists would splice it in place with masking tape and then you’d have to fix it). Sometimes you had to splice in new trailers or remove inappropriate ones as well.
Anyway, you counted splices by rapidly winding through the reel with a benchtop motor with a speed control belted to a takeup reel while the source spun freely. Then, while letting the film slide between your fingers, counting each “bump” you felt as it wound through. I was told to ground myself by touching the metal switch plate of the speed control knob with my other hand. One night I forgot and let go until my hair started rising. I’d gone through most of the reel at a very high speed and acquired its charge.
I reached for the switch plate and shot an 8-10” arcing discharge between the plate and my fingers.
Lesson learned, I held the switch plate from then on.
@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
I actually work with high voltage for a living, and I have high skepticism about this story. While it is technically possible if you work out the math and somehow get an extremely dense e-field flux, from a practical standpoint it might well be impossible. HV like they describe, especially in high humidity, really likes to equalize itself in a big flash.
I strongly suspect instead is that there was a spot where you could really feel the e-field, and people just through rumor and story telling morphed it into "the wall".
I accept that a reel to reel could generate a high static charge field but I would expect anything creating this level of physical phenomenon would be dangerous to humans.
Wouldn’t it be much more likely for someone walking into such a space to become a lightning rod rather than a fly in a spider web?
Maybe someone here knows a science youtuber (Veritasium/Smarter Every Day etc) with enough clout to try to get an in with 3M or similar and try to reproduce
I used to work for a company that bought off cuts from this plant and the static that comes off of these rolls is scary. I heard this story years ago and no one in our plant had a doubt about it being true because 3M ran enormous rolls.
See, I can believe that there are enormous EM fields in play. But I can't believe that the employees working there would react to them without code brown-ing.
When I was young I started my career working in manufacturing. Specifically machine shops with presses, CNC machines, EDM machines, ect...
You would be amazed at the level of hazard people are willing to accept. For example, I recall running one machine, a 300 ton press with an 84"x54" bed and 24" of stroke. It was 25 feet tall and we nicknamed this one Optimus Prime. When Optimus was warmed up he would spit warm hydraulic oil all over the place. A nice fine mist along with a slurry of hydraulic rain drops would cover the area. The solution was to wear Weimao hats made out of disposable cardboard.
Another machine was a 50+ year old roll form machine. How I did not lose my life on this machine is beyond me. Modern machines feed the material automatically and have clutches and brakes with optical sensors so they can stop on a dime. This one literally used inertia and a massive flywheel to function. You got the rollers spinning and fed the material into the first roller, then as it came out you had to guide the material into the next roller. Manually. In between spinning rollers. With your hands. And the machine had a 1,000lb flywheel that gave the whole thing intertia. You only needed to give it throttle once, and the whole machine would spin for 30+ seconds whether it was forming material, or your arm, or whatever. Chances are it would have sucked an entire human into the rollers on one blip of the throttle. And the coup de grâce was the throttle was a 50lb lever on a swing pivot. If you drop this lever to turn the machine OFF, it would bounce with gravity and bounce itself back on. This is not a third world country. These machines are located in Newburyport Massachusetts.
I was a lot younger back then, but to this day that is how helicopter engine are made. Those antiquated tools are more important to the major aerospace companies than any operator they've ever had.
Considering that it's possible to levitate a live frog with a (very strong) magnet without killing it, I'm able to believe that a sufficiently strong magnetic field can be detectable by a human without killing or immediately, obviously harming them.
I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, if true, this is the kind of crazy situation that could also lead to new mathematics where regimes considered unstable are revealed to have surprising stable nodes.
The big problem here is that it's described as a wall and not a progressively (quadratically) increasing field.
But what if there actually are network effects propagated by charge carrying particles in a suitably humid environment that turn the power of 2 into something else? Even a power of 3 could be perceived reasonably as a wall at human scale.
It's not "I want to believe" so much as "it feels like the maths might allow this under odd but reproducible circumstances" (my relevant background here is in math-physics and specifically analytic solutions to the relevant PDEs, which do have some very odd solutions). Would be nice to see people try.
There are differences between effects we can observe between ideal point charges and ones that only emerge as network effects when propagated across a network of less than ideal point charges that at least merit some investigation.
I believe the description as a "wall" is not completely correct. Yes, it's a wall as a unpassable obstacle, but the description they gave when walking into it seems more like a field "can't turn around just walk backwards".
The field was just dense enough to stop people from continuing moving forward similar to molasses.
This is the same impression I got, precisely because of this description. If it's the effect of a field, it would seem that by the point you notice it blocking your forward progress, you're already rather deep in it.
Makes me think of magnets, too - when you have two strong magnets oriented so they repel each other, and try to get them closer, the effect is very strongly non-linear and, unless you're intentionally pushing the magnets together with significant force, can feel like it turns on almost instantly.
The gripe I have though is that it is incredibly hard (if not impossible) to create a dense powerful e-field without it arcing over.
To be powerful you need an incredibly high voltage, to be dense you need the positive (holes, as they say) and negative charges to be close to each other.
If you could get 5MV between two plates that are a foot apart, that e-field would be insane an probably could do all manner of sci-fi. But it would flash over and equalize in a picosecond. Even if you had some kind of god tier power supply supply that could support a constant 5MV, you would just end up with a dense wad of plasma vaporizing everything.
> But on the other hand, if true, this is the kind of crazy situation that could also lead to new mathematics where regimes considered unstable are revealed to have surprising stable nodes.
I feel like if it was real, 3M would have immediately diverted a bunch of money into working out how to commercialize it, and we'd have evidence of that.
The thread is based on a conference talk and journal publication that preceded it.
The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application, requires a lot of equipment, requires the equipment to be intentionally improperly operated risking damage or injury, and it's extremely expensive to test.
Nobody is going to willingly tool up an environment capable of running a mile of 20 foot wide PP film at a thousand feet per minute, then purposely ungrounding the equipment, and run it at 100+ F and 95+ % humidity for hours, days, or weeks. Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
> Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
You're a couple orders of magnitude too high.
Polypropylene film isn't that expensive. A thousand feet per minute is only 10 miles per hour, which is not that fast at all. Humidity and heat aren't hard to generate in a closed space.
This is the kind of thing that's within the budget of some ambitious YouTubers, not millions of dollars.
It's a fun urban legend. The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
It's a fun urban legend. Leave it be, but don't take it seriously.
> it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
It's described as a wall because it's not just running a straight line. The PP line creates an archway where the "wall" is located. That's where the field is most intense. It's noticeable elsewhere but that's the point where as indicated in the paper they can no longer push through it.
> You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
This is also addressed in the paper. The lines can run 50-100% faster than it normally does but the faster they run it the more problematic the interference is. So during normal operation they limited it to 750-1000fpm.
> The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You might be taking “wall” too literally. I have no trouble believing that someone would call it a wall even if the force did gradually grow stronger over a significant distance.
The article mentions "50K ft. rolls 20ft wide". While you might not need the full 50K ft length (if you can even buy such a roll with less length), the 20 ft wide spec is probably fairly important. I wonder how much that'd cost, including transportation? Also, I have no idea how much it'd cost to buy or make machinery and supports to sufficiently handle such a sized roll. What are you estimating these costs would be?
It's not an unusual problem. Anything which moves thin sheets of insulating material at high speed can cause this. And so, there are standard devices for dealing with it.
The simplest is copper tinsel. That's even available at WalMart.[1] There are fancier systems. [2] The static eliminator doesn't have to touch the product. Close is good enough. Maybe 1 inch for tinsel, much greater for the active devices.
According to https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_index, 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F. The linked paper says "temperature often approached 100 F with relative humidity above 95%," and later references specific conditions of 92 F and 95% RH (137 F heat index).
Are these sorts of heat index values feasible for a plant environment? The line about 100/95 seems almost hyperbolic, which doesn't help with credibility in my opinion. Maybe I'm missing something.
That's basically normal for unconditioned factory spaces in the US south during the summer. Ungodly hot, ungodly humid, and generally just shit to exist inside.
This is in large part why historically industrialized factories tended to be concentrated in colder, higher latitude regions until the 20th century. Without refrigeration the work was far harder and more exhausting for the workers and that limited efficient use of labor.
Tell me about it. I worked for 3M owned Saint Gobain running kevlar and fiberglass sheets thru 5-story oven feeds. it was often 105°F on the floor, but if you were unlucky enough to lose your line you'd be hiking up 5 stories of oven stacks where temps would be soaring. Not to mention every Friday PM shift would start with running junk lines super hot to "clean" (burn-off) all the accumulated Teflon in the oven walls and exhausts (which did not work efficiently enough) from the prior week. So, at 3PM you would start your shift already drenched in sweat watching as a Teflon smoke plume formed at the ceiling of the 7-story plant, like a dark storm cloud, and slowly make its way down to the floor. By 10PM we would all be coughing and exhausted, scratchy throats, etc.
A lady on 3rd shift who ran my machine had a near death incident and the company swept that under the rug along with plenty of other seriously concerning practices.
I don't doubt those temperatures at all. But do you know what the relative humidity was? It's the combo that causes problems fast. 100 F and 60% RH is miserable and dangerous, but that's a wet bulb of about 90 F, so there's some marginal potential for your body to cool itself. 100 F and 95% RH is a WB of 98.6 F. Any heat generated in your body has no where to go.
A funny thing happens to those who live or train in extreme environments, their body adapts over time. You or I might pass out if we were suddenly exposed to that sort of factory environment, but an experienced worker might handle limited exposure just fine. The human body is amazingly adaptable.
Nah, that will literally kill any human in potentially minutes. No one can heat adapt to 100F + 95% relative humidity. It literally will cook you dead.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I experienced any force field effects. I dont recall the humidity, but I do recall looking up OSHA rules regarding heat, and they only offer "guidance", nothing is regulated or enforced solely based on the temperature but they do reference relative humidity.
I've spent a little bit of time in those types of spaces. I absolutely believe the temperatures referenced, but approaching 100 F with humidity above 95% is likely deadly in a short amount of time. And to then seemingly make jokes about selling tickets to walk into an area where you get physically stuck for mysterious reasons adds to my opinion that some of the report seems hyperbolic.
Yeah it can be deadly but it is unfortunately quite common.
People adapt to it and can tolerate longer spans in it but it's still super taxing and requires regular breaks if you are doing any amount of serious activity. And of course lots of fans and anything else that can raise the evaporation rate and heat dissipation help.
The jokes ngl sound like the exact type of humor you'd expect from people who work out on the floor. Basically "oh well that's fucking horrifying, I bet we could make some money selling tickets".
There are a lot of places in plants that can end up being deadly for any extended amount of times in particular weather conditions.
There was a grain processing plant up in the midwest were my dad worked that had an area enclosed in between building they'd close off access to on the hottest summer days. Light would be excessively focused in that area from other buildings, and moisture from other processes and lack of air circulation lead to deadly wet bulb temperatures.
There are much easier and cheaper ways of generating megavolts of electricity, I think the biggest barrier would be getting someone who knows enough about this to build it despite their skepticism about the validity of it.
Sure but for creating fairly uniform/gradual fields of static electricity over a large space?
Electrostatic precipitators exist but they aren't large. Everything else I'm aware of that works on larger scales fails to satisfy the uniform/gradual aspect.
I don't. It was shitty experiments presented to the clueless public as an example of how science works. The experiments usually did a terrible job of actually testing things, were so badly designed they malfunctioned more than anything else, and half the time they'd get results that were at best inconclusive or seems one way and they'd just declare it to be the other.
I think those two clowns did more to harm scientific literacy than almost anyone else except maybe the Texas Board of Education. Not to mention, Adam is pretty well known for being a tool.
Can it? Or are their safety aspects that make it dangerous in enough situations that you shouldn't let the public there. I wouldn't be surprised if it was mostly safe but once in a while there was a deadly spark. For sure I wouldn't let someone with a pacemaker or similar device near this. I also wouldn't allow phones, wallets, key - anything with electronics - near.
I think it's telling that said panic was short-lived, and to anyone watching the video, laughably silly. Unless you're a psychologist studying the dynamics of digital crowds, it probably isn't very interesting at all.
By contrast that same "panic" would probably have been framed as UFO's and an alien invasion pre-smartphone era.
I wouldn't bet on that either, but they're less mainstream, less respected, and most of us no longer feel a particular urge to humor them. Every passing year makes them less relevant, and more like the sort of people who believe in any other conspiracy theory or magical belief system.
We made some fundamental mistakes when it comes to the subject of why people believe what they believe. The polite and intellectual answer to that has a lot to say about evidence and reason, replication, publication, review... but that simply doesn't move most people. That isn't how most people live their lives. MOST people operate on networks of trust, because they lack the interest or the capacity to make informed decisions about many things. They don't know how a nuclear power plant works, they don't know anything about monoclonal antibodies, but they know people and places they trust. Their "smart" and "informed" social networks, their doctor, their priest, etc.
Unfortunately those networks of trust are easy to corrupt, not for everyone, but for a large number of people.
To be fair, if one includes religions this is significantly more than half the population. Add in astrology, psychics, ghosts, crystals, auras and other common 'woo' and it gets higher still. Sadly, HN is not a representative population sample. Skeptical non-believers are still a minority in the modern world.
I'd say anyone who doesn't believe in UFOs is just not observant enough. That doesn't mean aliens among us or secret government spy planes, but if you watch the sky long enough, you'll see some odd, hard to explain things.
> One thread about this in 1995, and then the phenomenon is never seen nor heard about again . . .
A default mode of skepticism is best, however the story of this incident didn't trigger my "Yeah, probably not" reflex. It is based on known physical principles and the extremely unusual context seems in the ballpark of sufficient to potentially cause something like this. So my assumption was this was an extremely unlikely edge case that happened "that one time."
It's also not something which strikes me as being a thing people who work in a large 3M factory would lie about.
Bigfoot and ghosts yes, but the recent drone mania seems to have increased. :) Maybe they would have been called UFOs before we had video to look back on.
A lot of the recent drone mania is people taking videos of airplanes and helicopters. At this point I don't know how many of these videos are making fun or the paranoid people.
I was amazed how suddenly it stopped being a thing. It was like one day people were talking about it all the time, and then the next day it went away completely.
My Mom was super into this just like all the things her TV tells her to be super into. I asked her today what happened to them and said she "guessed they fulfilled their purpose and went back to China". :D
It started exactly when the public was getting angry at the media about killing healthcare CEOs and expressing their joy, and ended as soon as everyone stopped talking about that.
Which is just conspiratorial thinking. It also ended as soon as people posted pictures of stars and planes as "evidence" and insisted that the evidence was still valid because "the aliens are just appearing as planes". It also ended the moment r/UFO threads showed up on the front page of reddit and normal people who thought this MIGHT be something got to see the insane mental gymnastics of the people insisting we should pay attention to it.
Electric fields really like to be linear, but the described anomalous effects are highly nonlinear
The non-anomalous effects, like high electric field readings, could linear
The wall only effects living things- birds, bugs and people
My guess is that the wall is mediated by the nervous system and muscle contractions, which unlike electrostatic forces, are free to have thresholds, nonlinearities, and psychological effects. Basically, everyone involved was getting zapped all to heck and any subjective experience is plausible downstream of taking a megavolt to the spine
If that were the case, wouldn't people just fall down, and possibly die from their heart stopping? Instead of feeling an invisible wall that they can walk away from.
I've read this many times over the years, sort of enamored by how such a strange phenomenon popped out of a factory setting.
In the most 2016 update the relative says it's common to see weird effects from the spools. If it's so common it should be reproducible I would think, yet I've never seen it done.
I've seen this happen in a wide range of production environments (both industrial and computing). Not this effect specifically, but "odd emergent behavior that occurs only at scale that is non-obvious and state-dependent". For example I work at a company that grows a lot of cells is massive reactors, and some folks who run the largest reactors commented that they saw slow changes in overall production that were not explainable by any observed variable (we speculated that slow genetic drift occurred in populations, but it may also have been seasonal, or due to unobserved variables). And when I worked at Google, there were definitely cluster-wide things that you'd only notice if you were very knowledgeable and attuned to their ongoing processes.
My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
> My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
Not unobserved. Unremarked maybe? It's expected behavior that leads us into personification of systems e.g. calling ships 'she' or talking about temperament between similar machines on a line.
Every time I look into those I come away thinking that Occam's Razor would suggest a different explanation: the original characterization was, knowingly or not, incorrect. Patents so frequently fail to contain sufficient information to allow a practitioner skilled to in the appropriate arts to reproduce the claims that it seems more plausible that the disappearing polymorph stories should be reclassified as "someone was caught fibbing" stories. In the replication crisis, we don't assume that the problem is that something about the world has changed, we assume that the original was flawed, and we should do the same here.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
I skimmed the literature on this and the ritonavir story seems legit.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
From experience with large scale clusters, yeah. Weird stuff happens. But it's very hard to setup a test cluster that is actually representative, and you can only do so much on a live cluster. Occasionally, I have been able to find explanations for some of the weird behavior, but usually it's like here's a bug in Linux packet forwarding that was fixed in Linus's tree 15 years ago, but apparently has never been deployed to some router, so it's just going to keep aggregating input packets because large receive offload, and then drop them with needs frag because the aggregated packet is too big to forward. sigh (that's not exactly a cluster scale issue, but it's the most relatable example of an investigation that comes to mind)
You're pretty unlikely to get academic papers when the required setup involves having 100M+ clients geographically dispersed. And it's going to be very hard for peers to reproduce your findings.
In case of this "invisible electrostatic wall", there were likely significant amount of people in that company who were at least somewhat into Star Trek[0], so I'd expect more than mere "meh, this happens" from people who had just seem to have accidentally invented a force field. It's not merely a weird emergent behavior, it's a behavior closely resembling a sci-fi technology, and therefore likely to have similar applications - so quite obviously a potential money and fame printer.
--
[0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!
When you work in production and have quotas to meet, you often ignore interesting side-effects. When I worked at google I worked at global cluster scale and frequently saw any number of events that in themselves would have been graduate-student-for-two-years projects that I had to force myself to ignore so I could get my main work (large scale protein design using 1-3 million cores in prod) to finish.
As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.
Do you recall anything that would make it possible to find any descriptions of this experiment? When I try to search for "a thousand people focus attention on a chair" I just get stuff about meditation and an "ADHD chair". Which is apparently a thing.
The phenomenon in question has been discussed before, and its underlying mechanism can be attributed to electrostatics. A simple thought experiment illustrates this concept: imagine a person with a net electric charge approaching a similarly charged object. As they draw closer, a force of repulsion builds up, increasing exponentially with the inverse square of the distance.
However, a crucial aspect of this phenomenon remains unclear: how does the charge maintain its containment? What prevents the opposing charge from breaking through the insulating barrier and neutralizing the charge? A fascinating analogy from the Boston Science museum offers some insight. Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere – akin to a Van De Graff generator. If your charge polarity matches that of the sphere, you'll experience a repulsive force, pushing you toward the center. The harder you try to reach the sphere's edge, the stronger the repulsion becomes.
This phenomenon becomes even more intriguing when considering the context in which it allegedly occurred. A company renowned for its innovative prowess, 3M has consistently demonstrated its ability to harness unexpected effects and transform them into groundbreaking products. The Post-it note's origin story is a testament to this innovative spirit. Given this track record, it's puzzling that 3M seemingly failed to capitalize on this electrostatic phenomenon. One would expect the company to rigorously investigate and replicate the effect, with the potential for a multi-billion dollar industry hanging in the balance. Instead, the story suggests that 3M dismissed the phenomenon as a mere curiosity.
> Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere – akin to a Van De Graff generator. If your charge polarity matches that of the sphere, you'll experience a repulsive force.
This is not correct. The field inside a charged conductor is zero. You will experience no force. If there is a hole in the sphere you will experience a repulsive force if you are close to the hole (compared to its size).
Yes, just like with Newtonian gravity. Any inverse-square law force will be zero inside a spherical shell. The higher force from parts of the shell closer to you is exactly canceled out by the farther parts exerting less force but there being more of those farther parts.
For gravity, it's only true for spherical shells, but in the case of charged electrical conductors, it's true no matter what the shape of the shell is. The field inside a charged, conductive small stellated dodecahedron is also zero everywhere inside. That's because the charge in the conductor migrates as long as there's an electrical field to make it migrate; it stops moving once it neutralizes the field.
(If you made an actual small stellated dodecahedron with infinitely sharp points, the charge would leak away from the points via field emission. Or, in theory, you'd have an infinitely strong electrical field there, and therefore all kinds of singularities. But reasonable approximations of the setup are possible in real life.)
Why do you think that? Negative results are boring. A failure to publish them does not indicate a lack of investigative rigor. Speaking of which, if you're going to complain about rigor, this is a bad look:
> increasing exponentially with the inverse square
All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the mechanical energy in the system is it not? I’m surprised they let it zap like that video and don’t try to recuperate it somewhere.
One of the weirdest power scavenging solutions I ever saw used a spark gap and a bespoke transformer to make a reverse Tesla coil - taking the very high, very brief voltage spike of a static discharge and stepping it down to create low voltage over a a longer interval. They attached it to their shoe.
> All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the mechanical energy in the system is it not? I’m surprised they let it zap like that video and don’t try to recuperate it somewhere.
Yes, but while the voltage is very high, the energy stored is very low so I don't think it makes any sense to try recover it (there's probably much more energy being wasted by poor insulation of the heated offices or stuff like this).
Why would an electrostatic force repel humans? We are neutrally charged.
And if anything, in metals I think (???) you can get attraction as free electrons in the neutral body are attracted/repelled towards the charge and the neutral body becomes a dipol (so eg. if the charged body is positively charged then the negatively charged electrons are attracted towards it, and vice versa). But that's weak and acts the wrong way.
It's possible to induce charge in things - this principle is used for holding silicon wafers inside lithography machines but works for other materials too (https://youtu.be/pgV8l5yLadQ)
In that case, the person would've been very quickly equalized to the same charge, and the wall would be gone (for you at least) more quickly than you could even feel it.
An experimental setup, including the land and a new used steel construction could cost less than $500k. Someone could throw a couple million at it to control for humidity, temperature, airflow, etc, with all sorts of variety, and it could be a lot of fun.
If something like this could be made safe, I imagine there are applications in security and process safety in places like nuclear power, water treatment, any facility where you want to restrict access in an extreme way. I'd imagine that it would never be safe, any discharge is going to fry whatever completes the circuit.
> Someone could throw a couple million at it to control for humidity, temperature, airflow, etc, with all sorts of variety, and it could be a lot of fun.
That's the kind of projects I'd fund if I were a billionaire, not trying to buy the biggest yacht …
I worked briefly in a factory where they had these giant rolls arriving daily... they were put onto a machine that would spool them off onto smaller rolls (say 100ft) and chop them. It's definitely something commonplace.
It's been a while since I took electrostatics, but I don't understand the theory behind this. If the rolls become charged and you are presumably neutral, wouldn't they attract you rather than repel you? That's what makes me think this story is apocryphal.
Wow - nice to know that this old story has survived for so long! I remember reading it a long time ago. Has this phemomenon been repicated by someone or has someone invented something because of that?
> He said it was actually known to the technicians for awhile before he experienced it and they just were kinda like "meh".
I think this was my favorite part of the article. These workers apparently hit this force field prior and just figured that was a normal part of the job, who cares.
Unless engineers looked at it and said not reliable (only works with low humidly), prone to breakdowns, and might randomly kill people. And then some general stood up and said what is wrong with your standard reinforced door?
That's merely an engineering issue. Keep spraying it with water or something. You do it right, and you might even get the familiar buzzing and shimmering of Star Trek force fields!
> prone to breakdowns
Ah yes, that's very much like Star Trek force fields.
> and might randomly kill people
That might be an issue for Starfleet. A real-world military today will definitely see this as a feature.
Ultimately, you're not wrong, but I would hope some military or other entity with deep budget would try building it anyway, simply because science isn't about "why?", it's about "why not?". I would also imagine, should this design work and became widely-known, some hacker would build and operate it just because.
> A real-world military today will definitely see this as a feature.
Real world militaries are still pretty picky about who they kill. In particular they don't like killing their own soldiers, who are most likely to be in the discharge path for a shield around their own stuff.
I remember reading about this many years ago but have never been able to find the story again. So regardless of its veracity, I'm happy to see it come up.
If this was reproducible I could think of so many real world uses. Invisible force fields that can move hundreds of pounds is a holy grail in several fields.
Of metal, yes. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about force fields in the sci-fi sense. An invisible wall that a person can't pass through.
I was clarifying the sense I was using the term "force field". Not a generic field of electromagnetic forces, but the fantastical one that can contain arbitrary matter.
Like the one described in the article, that a person was leaning against and could not pass through. If this were something that we could reproduce, it would have awesome real-world uses. Like a real hover board! Or the best anti-theft protection for my parked car.
You could though. Given a sufficiently strong enough positively (or negatively) charged electric field and yourself equally positively (or negatively) charged sufficiently you could have an 'invisible' wall that you couldn't walk through. Assuming that neither yourself or the field you're walking into has anywhere to discharge to.
Yes the 45 Tesla magnet in Tallahassee can levitate small non ferrous things like a strawberry in a little tube and draws 56 megawatts about 7% of the cities power grid.
Yeah I'm not sure this story makes sense either. Shoes may act as an insulator but wedding rings and belt buckles would presumably conduct.
Additionally potential differences tend to attract rather than repel unless these individuals were also charged with the same polarity as the field as far as I know.
When someone is talking about insulating shoes their point is that the body is electrically isolated from the floor. Without that isolation charge can travel between the two. Concrete and skin are fairly good conductors by comparison with air or insulators.
Wearing a conducting ring might make it easier for charge from the air to move into your body through your skin - but it will not make it easier for that charge to get to the floor (and then to ground) from your body.
Generally when people talk about shoes (or tires) they are talking about voltages that can jump the distance from their foot to the ground through air - around the shoe.
Most shoes are not great insulators - they insulate but how knows who much. electricians sometimes buy special shows that do insulate. Those shoes come with care instructions and dust on the outside compromises their insulation.
Yet another request that HN reject any URL that isn't https.
Anyone clicking on a link like this is open to traffic injection. With several free automated cert services available, there's no excuse for this other than gross incompetence or laziness.
Reminder to everyone to divest of your 3M stock. They lied about the dangers of PFAs for decades. Suppressing science to create the biggest mass poisoning in human history needs some pushback from reasonable people.
Reminds me of the time I turned myself into a Van de Graff generator at work.
I was a theater projectionist, back when you had 20 minute reels you had to constantly change, while babysitting two high-voltage, water-cooled, carbon arc projectors. Sometimes the film would break and you’d have to splice it. So when the theater got a print in, you had to count and log the number of splices for each reel, then the next theater would do the same and retire the print when it got too spliced up (plus, sometimes if it was the last night of a run, some lazy projectionists would splice it in place with masking tape and then you’d have to fix it). Sometimes you had to splice in new trailers or remove inappropriate ones as well.
Anyway, you counted splices by rapidly winding through the reel with a benchtop motor with a speed control belted to a takeup reel while the source spun freely. Then, while letting the film slide between your fingers, counting each “bump” you felt as it wound through. I was told to ground myself by touching the metal switch plate of the speed control knob with my other hand. One night I forgot and let go until my hair started rising. I’d gone through most of the reel at a very high speed and acquired its charge.
I reached for the switch plate and shot an 8-10” arcing discharge between the plate and my fingers.
Lesson learned, I held the switch plate from then on.
Did you finish your shift that night? (Some 2cm arc from an electric fence brought me to my knees one time.)
@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
You had less voltage, but whole lots more current than parent post.
I actually work with high voltage for a living, and I have high skepticism about this story. While it is technically possible if you work out the math and somehow get an extremely dense e-field flux, from a practical standpoint it might well be impossible. HV like they describe, especially in high humidity, really likes to equalize itself in a big flash.
I strongly suspect instead is that there was a spot where you could really feel the e-field, and people just through rumor and story telling morphed it into "the wall".
I accept that a reel to reel could generate a high static charge field but I would expect anything creating this level of physical phenomenon would be dangerous to humans.
Wouldn’t it be much more likely for someone walking into such a space to become a lightning rod rather than a fly in a spider web?
Maybe someone here knows a science youtuber (Veritasium/Smarter Every Day etc) with enough clout to try to get an in with 3M or similar and try to reproduce
This pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.
I used to work for a company that bought off cuts from this plant and the static that comes off of these rolls is scary. I heard this story years ago and no one in our plant had a doubt about it being true because 3M ran enormous rolls.
See, I can believe that there are enormous EM fields in play. But I can't believe that the employees working there would react to them without code brown-ing.
When I was young I started my career working in manufacturing. Specifically machine shops with presses, CNC machines, EDM machines, ect...
You would be amazed at the level of hazard people are willing to accept. For example, I recall running one machine, a 300 ton press with an 84"x54" bed and 24" of stroke. It was 25 feet tall and we nicknamed this one Optimus Prime. When Optimus was warmed up he would spit warm hydraulic oil all over the place. A nice fine mist along with a slurry of hydraulic rain drops would cover the area. The solution was to wear Weimao hats made out of disposable cardboard.
Another machine was a 50+ year old roll form machine. How I did not lose my life on this machine is beyond me. Modern machines feed the material automatically and have clutches and brakes with optical sensors so they can stop on a dime. This one literally used inertia and a massive flywheel to function. You got the rollers spinning and fed the material into the first roller, then as it came out you had to guide the material into the next roller. Manually. In between spinning rollers. With your hands. And the machine had a 1,000lb flywheel that gave the whole thing intertia. You only needed to give it throttle once, and the whole machine would spin for 30+ seconds whether it was forming material, or your arm, or whatever. Chances are it would have sucked an entire human into the rollers on one blip of the throttle. And the coup de grâce was the throttle was a 50lb lever on a swing pivot. If you drop this lever to turn the machine OFF, it would bounce with gravity and bounce itself back on. This is not a third world country. These machines are located in Newburyport Massachusetts.
I was a lot younger back then, but to this day that is how helicopter engine are made. Those antiquated tools are more important to the major aerospace companies than any operator they've ever had.
Considering that it's possible to levitate a live frog with a (very strong) magnet without killing it, I'm able to believe that a sufficiently strong magnetic field can be detectable by a human without killing or immediately, obviously harming them.
This is an electrostatic field, which has no magnetic component in the classical model.
What do you make of the statement that it pulled in a fly, potentially a bird, yet repels humans?
Maybe it’s working by shocking muscles- it’s mostly acting on creatures not objects
I tend to agree with you. But on the other hand, if true, this is the kind of crazy situation that could also lead to new mathematics where regimes considered unstable are revealed to have surprising stable nodes.
The big problem here is that it's described as a wall and not a progressively (quadratically) increasing field.
But what if there actually are network effects propagated by charge carrying particles in a suitably humid environment that turn the power of 2 into something else? Even a power of 3 could be perceived reasonably as a wall at human scale.
It's not "I want to believe" so much as "it feels like the maths might allow this under odd but reproducible circumstances" (my relevant background here is in math-physics and specifically analytic solutions to the relevant PDEs, which do have some very odd solutions). Would be nice to see people try.
There are differences between effects we can observe between ideal point charges and ones that only emerge as network effects when propagated across a network of less than ideal point charges that at least merit some investigation.
I believe the description as a "wall" is not completely correct. Yes, it's a wall as a unpassable obstacle, but the description they gave when walking into it seems more like a field "can't turn around just walk backwards". The field was just dense enough to stop people from continuing moving forward similar to molasses.
This is the same impression I got, precisely because of this description. If it's the effect of a field, it would seem that by the point you notice it blocking your forward progress, you're already rather deep in it.
Perhaps humans feel resistance/repulsive forces non-linearly?
Makes me think of magnets, too - when you have two strong magnets oriented so they repel each other, and try to get them closer, the effect is very strongly non-linear and, unless you're intentionally pushing the magnets together with significant force, can feel like it turns on almost instantly.
> Perhaps humans feel resistance/repulsive forces non-linearly?
That's got to be the key here. Human perception is known to be logarithmic in so many other ways.
The gripe I have though is that it is incredibly hard (if not impossible) to create a dense powerful e-field without it arcing over.
To be powerful you need an incredibly high voltage, to be dense you need the positive (holes, as they say) and negative charges to be close to each other.
If you could get 5MV between two plates that are a foot apart, that e-field would be insane an probably could do all manner of sci-fi. But it would flash over and equalize in a picosecond. Even if you had some kind of god tier power supply supply that could support a constant 5MV, you would just end up with a dense wad of plasma vaporizing everything.
Scotch tape produces X-Rays, so something like this feels similarly plausible:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-ma...
(Even if that feeling is misplaced and uninformed)
> But on the other hand, if true, this is the kind of crazy situation that could also lead to new mathematics where regimes considered unstable are revealed to have surprising stable nodes.
I feel like if it was real, 3M would have immediately diverted a bunch of money into working out how to commercialize it, and we'd have evidence of that.
But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it and thus be unable to leave it ?
Ever notice how UFO and Bigfoot sightings mostly went away once everyone had a 4K60 video camera in their pockets?
One thread about this in 1995, and then the phenomenon is never seen nor heard about again . . .
Not just one thread.
ANTEC '97 Conference Proceedings, CRC Press, pages 1310-1313.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/SPE_ANTEC_1997_Proceedi...
The thread is based on a conference talk and journal publication that preceded it.
The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application, requires a lot of equipment, requires the equipment to be intentionally improperly operated risking damage or injury, and it's extremely expensive to test.
Nobody is going to willingly tool up an environment capable of running a mile of 20 foot wide PP film at a thousand feet per minute, then purposely ungrounding the equipment, and run it at 100+ F and 95+ % humidity for hours, days, or weeks. Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
> Just setting it up would cost millions of dollars and running it may cost millions more.
You're a couple orders of magnitude too high.
Polypropylene film isn't that expensive. A thousand feet per minute is only 10 miles per hour, which is not that fast at all. Humidity and heat aren't hard to generate in a closed space.
This is the kind of thing that's within the budget of some ambitious YouTubers, not millions of dollars.
It's a fun urban legend. The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
It's a fun urban legend. Leave it be, but don't take it seriously.
> it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
It's described as a wall because it's not just running a straight line. The PP line creates an archway where the "wall" is located. That's where the field is most intense. It's noticeable elsewhere but that's the point where as indicated in the paper they can no longer push through it.
> You also have to suspend disbelief and imagine this force field didn't impact the equipment itself. We're supposed to believe that a grown man can't push up against the field at a distance away from the source, but the plastic film and machinery inside of the field are continuing to operate as usual?
This is also addressed in the paper. The lines can run 50-100% faster than it normally does but the faster they run it the more problematic the interference is. So during normal operation they limited it to 750-1000fpm.
> The red flag for anyone who has studied anything related to electromagnetism is the way it's described as a wall, not a force that gradually grows stronger as you get closer. Forces don't work at distance like that.
You might be taking “wall” too literally. I have no trouble believing that someone would call it a wall even if the force did gradually grow stronger over a significant distance.
The article mentions "50K ft. rolls 20ft wide". While you might not need the full 50K ft length (if you can even buy such a roll with less length), the 20 ft wide spec is probably fairly important. I wonder how much that'd cost, including transportation? Also, I have no idea how much it'd cost to buy or make machinery and supports to sufficiently handle such a sized roll. What are you estimating these costs would be?
Ah. Nice to have a solid reference.
It's not an unusual problem. Anything which moves thin sheets of insulating material at high speed can cause this. And so, there are standard devices for dealing with it.
The simplest is copper tinsel. That's even available at WalMart.[1] There are fancier systems. [2] The static eliminator doesn't have to touch the product. Close is good enough. Maybe 1 inch for tinsel, much greater for the active devices.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/search?q=anti-static+tinsel
[2] https://www.takk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-TAKK-ca...
According to https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_index, 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F. The linked paper says "temperature often approached 100 F with relative humidity above 95%," and later references specific conditions of 92 F and 95% RH (137 F heat index).
Are these sorts of heat index values feasible for a plant environment? The line about 100/95 seems almost hyperbolic, which doesn't help with credibility in my opinion. Maybe I'm missing something.
That's basically normal for unconditioned factory spaces in the US south during the summer. Ungodly hot, ungodly humid, and generally just shit to exist inside.
This is in large part why historically industrialized factories tended to be concentrated in colder, higher latitude regions until the 20th century. Without refrigeration the work was far harder and more exhausting for the workers and that limited efficient use of labor.
Tell me about it. I worked for 3M owned Saint Gobain running kevlar and fiberglass sheets thru 5-story oven feeds. it was often 105°F on the floor, but if you were unlucky enough to lose your line you'd be hiking up 5 stories of oven stacks where temps would be soaring. Not to mention every Friday PM shift would start with running junk lines super hot to "clean" (burn-off) all the accumulated Teflon in the oven walls and exhausts (which did not work efficiently enough) from the prior week. So, at 3PM you would start your shift already drenched in sweat watching as a Teflon smoke plume formed at the ceiling of the 7-story plant, like a dark storm cloud, and slowly make its way down to the floor. By 10PM we would all be coughing and exhausted, scratchy throats, etc.
A lady on 3rd shift who ran my machine had a near death incident and the company swept that under the rug along with plenty of other seriously concerning practices.
AMA!
That job sounds like literal hell on earth.
I don't doubt those temperatures at all. But do you know what the relative humidity was? It's the combo that causes problems fast. 100 F and 60% RH is miserable and dangerous, but that's a wet bulb of about 90 F, so there's some marginal potential for your body to cool itself. 100 F and 95% RH is a WB of 98.6 F. Any heat generated in your body has no where to go.
A funny thing happens to those who live or train in extreme environments, their body adapts over time. You or I might pass out if we were suddenly exposed to that sort of factory environment, but an experienced worker might handle limited exposure just fine. The human body is amazingly adaptable.
Nah, that will literally kill any human in potentially minutes. No one can heat adapt to 100F + 95% relative humidity. It literally will cook you dead.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I experienced any force field effects. I dont recall the humidity, but I do recall looking up OSHA rules regarding heat, and they only offer "guidance", nothing is regulated or enforced solely based on the temperature but they do reference relative humidity.
I've spent a little bit of time in those types of spaces. I absolutely believe the temperatures referenced, but approaching 100 F with humidity above 95% is likely deadly in a short amount of time. And to then seemingly make jokes about selling tickets to walk into an area where you get physically stuck for mysterious reasons adds to my opinion that some of the report seems hyperbolic.
Check out the heat index page I linked above, or this similar one from OSHA: https://www.ohsa.com.au/services/heat-stress-monitoring/.
Yeah it can be deadly but it is unfortunately quite common.
People adapt to it and can tolerate longer spans in it but it's still super taxing and requires regular breaks if you are doing any amount of serious activity. And of course lots of fans and anything else that can raise the evaporation rate and heat dissipation help.
The jokes ngl sound like the exact type of humor you'd expect from people who work out on the floor. Basically "oh well that's fucking horrifying, I bet we could make some money selling tickets".
There are a lot of places in plants that can end up being deadly for any extended amount of times in particular weather conditions.
There was a grain processing plant up in the midwest were my dad worked that had an area enclosed in between building they'd close off access to on the hottest summer days. Light would be excessively focused in that area from other buildings, and moisture from other processes and lack of air circulation lead to deadly wet bulb temperatures.
> 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F.
So just a typical summer day in Texas
There are much easier and cheaper ways of generating megavolts of electricity, I think the biggest barrier would be getting someone who knows enough about this to build it despite their skepticism about the validity of it.
That is what grants are for. And DARPA when something more specific, like this, is to be investigated.
"And DARPA"
That was my first thought - the military would be all over this if there's even a remote chance you could build energy shields or something.
Sure but for creating fairly uniform/gradual fields of static electricity over a large space?
Electrostatic precipitators exist but they aren't large. Everything else I'm aware of that works on larger scales fails to satisfy the uniform/gradual aspect.
I miss MythBusters.
I don't. It was shitty experiments presented to the clueless public as an example of how science works. The experiments usually did a terrible job of actually testing things, were so badly designed they malfunctioned more than anything else, and half the time they'd get results that were at best inconclusive or seems one way and they'd just declare it to be the other.
I think those two clowns did more to harm scientific literacy than almost anyone else except maybe the Texas Board of Education. Not to mention, Adam is pretty well known for being a tool.
We could design the experiment. Then try to reduce the experiment to a cheap, convenient form.
Surely somebody has done at least that.
> The reason this particular case hasn't been reproduced is just because it has no practical application
It can be a tourist attraction you sell tickets to.
In the fine article it is mentioned that the plant manager debated whether to fix it or sell tickets.
Can it? Or are their safety aspects that make it dangerous in enough situations that you shouldn't let the public there. I wouldn't be surprised if it was mostly safe but once in a while there was a deadly spark. For sure I wouldn't let someone with a pacemaker or similar device near this. I also wouldn't allow phones, wallets, key - anything with electronics - near.
On the other hand, we just witnessed a nationwide drone panic, and not for a lack of video evidence…
An odd phenomenon being rare and hard to document is neither proof nor evidence of absence for it existing.
I think it's telling that said panic was short-lived, and to anyone watching the video, laughably silly. Unless you're a psychologist studying the dynamics of digital crowds, it probably isn't very interesting at all.
By contrast that same "panic" would probably have been framed as UFO's and an alien invasion pre-smartphone era.
I personally really wouldn't bet on there being less UFO believers these days than before the ubiquitous availability of cameras.
I wouldn't bet on that either, but they're less mainstream, less respected, and most of us no longer feel a particular urge to humor them. Every passing year makes them less relevant, and more like the sort of people who believe in any other conspiracy theory or magical belief system.
Which is frankly where they always belonged.
At the other end of the spectrum, the belief that the moon landing was faked seems to be steadily increasing in popularity. I don't get it at all.
We made some fundamental mistakes when it comes to the subject of why people believe what they believe. The polite and intellectual answer to that has a lot to say about evidence and reason, replication, publication, review... but that simply doesn't move most people. That isn't how most people live their lives. MOST people operate on networks of trust, because they lack the interest or the capacity to make informed decisions about many things. They don't know how a nuclear power plant works, they don't know anything about monoclonal antibodies, but they know people and places they trust. Their "smart" and "informed" social networks, their doctor, their priest, etc.
Unfortunately those networks of trust are easy to corrupt, not for everyone, but for a large number of people.
> magical belief system.
To be fair, if one includes religions this is significantly more than half the population. Add in astrology, psychics, ghosts, crystals, auras and other common 'woo' and it gets higher still. Sadly, HN is not a representative population sample. Skeptical non-believers are still a minority in the modern world.
I'd say UFO mania is more intense and more mainstream than ever. Still no remotely compelling physical evidence, of course.
I'd say anyone who doesn't believe in UFOs is just not observant enough. That doesn't mean aliens among us or secret government spy planes, but if you watch the sky long enough, you'll see some odd, hard to explain things.
> One thread about this in 1995, and then the phenomenon is never seen nor heard about again . . .
A default mode of skepticism is best, however the story of this incident didn't trigger my "Yeah, probably not" reflex. It is based on known physical principles and the extremely unusual context seems in the ballpark of sufficient to potentially cause something like this. So my assumption was this was an extremely unlikely edge case that happened "that one time."
It's also not something which strikes me as being a thing people who work in a large 3M factory would lie about.
> It is based on known physical principles
What exactly does it repel against a human? And why would it repel instead of discharge?
They even went home and came back the next day. Why not bring a camcorder along?
Bigfoot and ghosts yes, but the recent drone mania seems to have increased. :) Maybe they would have been called UFOs before we had video to look back on.
A lot of the recent drone mania is people taking videos of airplanes and helicopters. At this point I don't know how many of these videos are making fun or the paranoid people.
I was amazed how suddenly it stopped being a thing. It was like one day people were talking about it all the time, and then the next day it went away completely.
My Mom was super into this just like all the things her TV tells her to be super into. I asked her today what happened to them and said she "guessed they fulfilled their purpose and went back to China". :D
It started exactly when the public was getting angry at the media about killing healthcare CEOs and expressing their joy, and ended as soon as everyone stopped talking about that.
Which is just conspiratorial thinking. It also ended as soon as people posted pictures of stars and planes as "evidence" and insisted that the evidence was still valid because "the aliens are just appearing as planes". It also ended the moment r/UFO threads showed up on the front page of reddit and normal people who thought this MIGHT be something got to see the insane mental gymnastics of the people insisting we should pay attention to it.
Yeah, my local news had a clip that was clearly an American Airlines tail logo.
That's the best way to disguise UFOs! Shape them like airliners and carry passengers on regular daily routes! No one would ever suspect a thing.
Oh no, I've said too much.
https://www.xkcd.com/2572/
What does this comment have to do with OP?
Previously discussed:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299441 (2018)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052 (2013)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335 (2011)
Electric fields really like to be linear, but the described anomalous effects are highly nonlinear
The non-anomalous effects, like high electric field readings, could linear
The wall only effects living things- birds, bugs and people
My guess is that the wall is mediated by the nervous system and muscle contractions, which unlike electrostatic forces, are free to have thresholds, nonlinearities, and psychological effects. Basically, everyone involved was getting zapped all to heck and any subjective experience is plausible downstream of taking a megavolt to the spine
If that were the case, wouldn't people just fall down, and possibly die from their heart stopping? Instead of feeling an invisible wall that they can walk away from.
I've read this many times over the years, sort of enamored by how such a strange phenomenon popped out of a factory setting.
In the most 2016 update the relative says it's common to see weird effects from the spools. If it's so common it should be reproducible I would think, yet I've never seen it done.
I've seen this happen in a wide range of production environments (both industrial and computing). Not this effect specifically, but "odd emergent behavior that occurs only at scale that is non-obvious and state-dependent". For example I work at a company that grows a lot of cells is massive reactors, and some folks who run the largest reactors commented that they saw slow changes in overall production that were not explainable by any observed variable (we speculated that slow genetic drift occurred in populations, but it may also have been seasonal, or due to unobserved variables). And when I worked at Google, there were definitely cluster-wide things that you'd only notice if you were very knowledgeable and attuned to their ongoing processes.
My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
> My guess is that this happens in nearly all large-scale production systems but goes mostly unobserved.
Not unobserved. Unremarked maybe? It's expected behavior that leads us into personification of systems e.g. calling ships 'she' or talking about temperament between similar machines on a line.
I think the disappearing polymorph stories are also pretty spooky. These have real-life impacts, like with ritonavir.
Every time I look into those I come away thinking that Occam's Razor would suggest a different explanation: the original characterization was, knowingly or not, incorrect. Patents so frequently fail to contain sufficient information to allow a practitioner skilled to in the appropriate arts to reproduce the claims that it seems more plausible that the disappearing polymorph stories should be reclassified as "someone was caught fibbing" stories. In the replication crisis, we don't assume that the problem is that something about the world has changed, we assume that the original was flawed, and we should do the same here.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
I skimmed the literature on this and the ritonavir story seems legit.
There really is a peer-reviewed paper saying that there are five crystalline forms of the stuff. ("Elucidation of crystal form diversity of the HIV protease inhibitor ritonavir by high-throughput crystallization", Applied Physical Sciences, Feb 2003).
It really does seem that in 1998 the more stable Form II suddenly started coming out of the factory, with lower solubility and such bad oral bioavailability that the oral capsules were withdrawn from the market until Abbott figured out a new way to make the drug. (I think they were already moving from a capsule to a gelcap and the gelcap didn't have the same issue? Just reading … this is not such a good source perhaps but lovely bare HTML: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html )
From experience with large scale clusters, yeah. Weird stuff happens. But it's very hard to setup a test cluster that is actually representative, and you can only do so much on a live cluster. Occasionally, I have been able to find explanations for some of the weird behavior, but usually it's like here's a bug in Linux packet forwarding that was fixed in Linus's tree 15 years ago, but apparently has never been deployed to some router, so it's just going to keep aggregating input packets because large receive offload, and then drop them with needs frag because the aggregated packet is too big to forward. sigh (that's not exactly a cluster scale issue, but it's the most relatable example of an investigation that comes to mind)
You're pretty unlikely to get academic papers when the required setup involves having 100M+ clients geographically dispersed. And it's going to be very hard for peers to reproduce your findings.
In case of this "invisible electrostatic wall", there were likely significant amount of people in that company who were at least somewhat into Star Trek[0], so I'd expect more than mere "meh, this happens" from people who had just seem to have accidentally invented a force field. It's not merely a weird emergent behavior, it's a behavior closely resembling a sci-fi technology, and therefore likely to have similar applications - so quite obviously a potential money and fame printer.
-- [0] - Which was well-known around the time of that event, and at its peak of popularity when the report in the article was filed!
When you work in production and have quotas to meet, you often ignore interesting side-effects. When I worked at google I worked at global cluster scale and frequently saw any number of events that in themselves would have been graduate-student-for-two-years projects that I had to force myself to ignore so I could get my main work (large scale protein design using 1-3 million cores in prod) to finish.
As a side note, always test any global-scale torrent system for package distribution carefully, as sometimes the code can have "accidentally n**2" network usage that only shows up when you have a worldwide grid of clusters.
It reminds me of that experiment where they had an audience of 1000 focus their attention upon a chair on a stage.
What happened?
The chair got chairier.
I don't recall what that means.
Do you recall anything that would make it possible to find any descriptions of this experiment? When I try to search for "a thousand people focus attention on a chair" I just get stuff about meditation and an "ADHD chair". Which is apparently a thing.
I'll see what I can find
The phenomenon in question has been discussed before, and its underlying mechanism can be attributed to electrostatics. A simple thought experiment illustrates this concept: imagine a person with a net electric charge approaching a similarly charged object. As they draw closer, a force of repulsion builds up, increasing exponentially with the inverse square of the distance.
However, a crucial aspect of this phenomenon remains unclear: how does the charge maintain its containment? What prevents the opposing charge from breaking through the insulating barrier and neutralizing the charge? A fascinating analogy from the Boston Science museum offers some insight. Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere – akin to a Van De Graff generator. If your charge polarity matches that of the sphere, you'll experience a repulsive force, pushing you toward the center. The harder you try to reach the sphere's edge, the stronger the repulsion becomes.
This phenomenon becomes even more intriguing when considering the context in which it allegedly occurred. A company renowned for its innovative prowess, 3M has consistently demonstrated its ability to harness unexpected effects and transform them into groundbreaking products. The Post-it note's origin story is a testament to this innovative spirit. Given this track record, it's puzzling that 3M seemingly failed to capitalize on this electrostatic phenomenon. One would expect the company to rigorously investigate and replicate the effect, with the potential for a multi-billion dollar industry hanging in the balance. Instead, the story suggests that 3M dismissed the phenomenon as a mere curiosity.
> Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere – akin to a Van De Graff generator. If your charge polarity matches that of the sphere, you'll experience a repulsive force.
This is not correct. The field inside a charged conductor is zero. You will experience no force. If there is a hole in the sphere you will experience a repulsive force if you are close to the hole (compared to its size).
Yes, just like with Newtonian gravity. Any inverse-square law force will be zero inside a spherical shell. The higher force from parts of the shell closer to you is exactly canceled out by the farther parts exerting less force but there being more of those farther parts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem
For gravity, it's only true for spherical shells, but in the case of charged electrical conductors, it's true no matter what the shape of the shell is. The field inside a charged, conductive small stellated dodecahedron is also zero everywhere inside. That's because the charge in the conductor migrates as long as there's an electrical field to make it migrate; it stops moving once it neutralizes the field.
(If you made an actual small stellated dodecahedron with infinitely sharp points, the charge would leak away from the points via field emission. Or, in theory, you'd have an infinitely strong electrical field there, and therefore all kinds of singularities. But reasonable approximations of the setup are possible in real life.)
Why do you think that? Negative results are boring. A failure to publish them does not indicate a lack of investigative rigor. Speaking of which, if you're going to complain about rigor, this is a bad look:
> increasing exponentially with the inverse square
This reads like a good SCP.
There's a lot of interesting ideas in the experiments section, here: http://amasci.com/freenrg/iontest.html
The Board <denies/demands> comprehensive analysis of this <occurrence/breach>.
All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the mechanical energy in the system is it not? I’m surprised they let it zap like that video and don’t try to recuperate it somewhere.
One of the weirdest power scavenging solutions I ever saw used a spark gap and a bespoke transformer to make a reverse Tesla coil - taking the very high, very brief voltage spike of a static discharge and stepping it down to create low voltage over a a longer interval. They attached it to their shoe.
> All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the mechanical energy in the system is it not? I’m surprised they let it zap like that video and don’t try to recuperate it somewhere.
Yes, but while the voltage is very high, the energy stored is very low so I don't think it makes any sense to try recover it (there's probably much more energy being wasted by poor insulation of the heated offices or stuff like this).
I was thinking less of energy efficiency and more of containment. Possibly damage reduction.
Why would an electrostatic force repel humans? We are neutrally charged.
And if anything, in metals I think (???) you can get attraction as free electrons in the neutral body are attracted/repelled towards the charge and the neutral body becomes a dipol (so eg. if the charged body is positively charged then the negatively charged electrons are attracted towards it, and vice versa). But that's weak and acts the wrong way.
I suppose you could take advantage of diamagnetism if a moving charge was involved... it works for frogs :)
It's possible to induce charge in things - this principle is used for holding silicon wafers inside lithography machines but works for other materials too (https://youtu.be/pgV8l5yLadQ)
Van de graaff generators discharge with painful shocks. I would expect something like described in the article to kill someone.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53985/was-an-in...
"The article says that because of the insulating nature of the floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
In that case, the person would've been very quickly equalized to the same charge, and the wall would be gone (for you at least) more quickly than you could even feel it.
I wish Mythbusters still existed to test stuff like this.
Can you imagine the expense? “We need 1 mile of poly film, 20-feet wide …”
A 5000 foot long roll of plastic is common. Here is a 50 inch wide roll that is over a mile long which costs $400:
https://www.mcmaster.com/19575T43
Or here is a 20 foot wide roll 1/10th of a mile long: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-20063/Plastic-Sheetin...
Based on the cost of the roll from McMaster, a wider roll with the same cost basis would be $2000.
An experimental setup, including the land and a new used steel construction could cost less than $500k. Someone could throw a couple million at it to control for humidity, temperature, airflow, etc, with all sorts of variety, and it could be a lot of fun.
If something like this could be made safe, I imagine there are applications in security and process safety in places like nuclear power, water treatment, any facility where you want to restrict access in an extreme way. I'd imagine that it would never be safe, any discharge is going to fry whatever completes the circuit.
> Someone could throw a couple million at it to control for humidity, temperature, airflow, etc, with all sorts of variety, and it could be a lot of fun.
That's the kind of projects I'd fund if I were a billionaire, not trying to buy the biggest yacht …
And once you'd worked it out, you could buy a yacht with a force field!
I worked briefly in a factory where they had these giant rolls arriving daily... they were put onto a machine that would spool them off onto smaller rolls (say 100ft) and chop them. It's definitely something commonplace.
Rolls like those were common in the warehouse at the place I worked.
Selling tickets on those non-humid days would have been more profitable than fixing anything.
Static discharge from machines like that has killed people in the past, so I’m not sure if that’s the best idea.
It's been a while since I took electrostatics, but I don't understand the theory behind this. If the rolls become charged and you are presumably neutral, wouldn't they attract you rather than repel you? That's what makes me think this story is apocryphal.
Wow - nice to know that this old story has survived for so long! I remember reading it a long time ago. Has this phemomenon been repicated by someone or has someone invented something because of that?
> He said it was actually known to the technicians for awhile before he experienced it and they just were kinda like "meh".
I think this was my favorite part of the article. These workers apparently hit this force field prior and just figured that was a normal part of the job, who cares.
We are talking about a sci-fi style force-field here! I'd be surprised if the military didn't secretly experiment with this.
Unless engineers looked at it and said not reliable (only works with low humidly), prone to breakdowns, and might randomly kill people. And then some general stood up and said what is wrong with your standard reinforced door?
> not reliable (only works with low humidly)
That's merely an engineering issue. Keep spraying it with water or something. You do it right, and you might even get the familiar buzzing and shimmering of Star Trek force fields!
> prone to breakdowns
Ah yes, that's very much like Star Trek force fields.
> and might randomly kill people
That might be an issue for Starfleet. A real-world military today will definitely see this as a feature.
Ultimately, you're not wrong, but I would hope some military or other entity with deep budget would try building it anyway, simply because science isn't about "why?", it's about "why not?". I would also imagine, should this design work and became widely-known, some hacker would build and operate it just because.
> A real-world military today will definitely see this as a feature.
Real world militaries are still pretty picky about who they kill. In particular they don't like killing their own soldiers, who are most likely to be in the discharge path for a shield around their own stuff.
water would be high humidity not low.
Second paragraph of the article starts with:
> This occurred in late summer in South Carolina, August 1980, in extremely high humidity.
But I may have misunderstood this as high humidity being key to it happening, rather than an impediment.
You can count on that.
Time for a YouTube video to be made
I remember reading about this many years ago but have never been able to find the story again. So regardless of its veracity, I'm happy to see it come up.
Can this be used in a bank vault?
A large steel door is a much easier and more reliable barrier
A sheet of plastic. With a heavy static charge. Moving at 10mph. Assumedly in the vicinity of a big ground.
Is that the whole experiment?
If this was reproducible I could think of so many real world uses. Invisible force fields that can move hundreds of pounds is a holy grail in several fields.
Ever see an electromagnet crane at a junk yard?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ...
You can make one yourself with a nail, some copper wire, and a battery.
That's pretty darn far from what we're talking about here. The comparison is absurd.
How so? It's literally an invisible (to the eye) field that can lift hundreds of pounds.
And magnetic fields are directly related to electric fields. It's called electromagnetism for a reason.
Of metal, yes. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about force fields in the sci-fi sense. An invisible wall that a person can't pass through.
The article is about an electrostatic field. That's far from sci-fi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field
I was clarifying the sense I was using the term "force field". Not a generic field of electromagnetic forces, but the fantastical one that can contain arbitrary matter.
Like the one described in the article, that a person was leaning against and could not pass through. If this were something that we could reproduce, it would have awesome real-world uses. Like a real hover board! Or the best anti-theft protection for my parked car.
You could though. Given a sufficiently strong enough positively (or negatively) charged electric field and yourself equally positively (or negatively) charged sufficiently you could have an 'invisible' wall that you couldn't walk through. Assuming that neither yourself or the field you're walking into has anywhere to discharge to.
Can an electromagnetic move organic material?
Extremely powerful fields can levitate a frog - so yes.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/how-did-you-g...
Probably not in a useful way; the induced currents would produce far too much heat.
If it's strong enough, probably. I mean, MRIs kind of work that way.
Yes the 45 Tesla magnet in Tallahassee can levitate small non ferrous things like a strawberry in a little tube and draws 56 megawatts about 7% of the cities power grid.
Wouldn't a field strong enough to somehow produce this effect be more likely to short out on anything, taking you out like a bug zapper?
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53985/was-an-in...
"The article says that because of the insulating nature of the floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
From my experience rolling up 1500-pound rolls of plastic, it will start arcing out a few feet to the metal of the winder when it gets strong enough.
Charge builds up over time, so there ought to be some discussion of how the field changed between 0 charge and the invisible wall state.
Yeah I'm not sure this story makes sense either. Shoes may act as an insulator but wedding rings and belt buckles would presumably conduct.
Additionally potential differences tend to attract rather than repel unless these individuals were also charged with the same polarity as the field as far as I know.
When someone is talking about insulating shoes their point is that the body is electrically isolated from the floor. Without that isolation charge can travel between the two. Concrete and skin are fairly good conductors by comparison with air or insulators.
Wearing a conducting ring might make it easier for charge from the air to move into your body through your skin - but it will not make it easier for that charge to get to the floor (and then to ground) from your body.
Generally when people talk about shoes (or tires) they are talking about voltages that can jump the distance from their foot to the ground through air - around the shoe.
Most shoes are not great insulators - they insulate but how knows who much. electricians sometimes buy special shows that do insulate. Those shoes come with care instructions and dust on the outside compromises their insulation.
> Wearing a conducting ring might make it easier for charge from the air to move into your body through your skin.
Which would likely make you a pretty nice load or resistor!
No, you need a path to ground for any current to flow. You need a difference in electrical potential more specifically.
When insulated, there is no difference. Your potential is “floating”.
Good point, a repulsive effect would have to be the same charge sign so no bug zapper.
Conduct... to where?
“So that’s what an invisible barrier looks like.”
We can turn beans into peas.
Yet another request that HN reject any URL that isn't https.
Anyone clicking on a link like this is open to traffic injection. With several free automated cert services available, there's no excuse for this other than gross incompetence or laziness.
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Reminder to everyone to divest of your 3M stock. They lied about the dangers of PFAs for decades. Suppressing science to create the biggest mass poisoning in human history needs some pushback from reasonable people.