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.
I worked in a casino that had a wool carpet. When the carpet was new it was ridiculous the amount of static that it generated on you. I was wearing steel toe non slip and anti shock shoes too!
I quickly learned to hold my machine keys ring (3 inch wide ring) and tap it to the slot machine frame. Often a three inch violet spark would jump and I could even feel my clothes move. One time I even causing one of the slot machine player tracking system to reboot, it was that or me better it got the hit.
A manager said at a casino they used to work at they would spray fabric softener on the rugs to alleviate static. I don't know if it worked or not.
I lived in an area with extremely dry winters (dew points below -40). My bedroom was carpeted. Some mornings I would reach for the light switch and see a 2" bolt of white pain jump off my finger. It was like a strobe light. I learned to touch light switches with my elbow. Same bolt but less painful to take it on the elbow.
The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that thing operating.
@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.
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
Lethality of electricity is multi-dimensional, trying to reduce it to a single quantity does not really work (exposure time and electrical frequency are very important).
Sounds a bit like fuse wire (except the frequency dependence)... There's both a current and a time component. High overloads can be tolerated for a very short time without blowing the fuse, while low overloads can be sustained for longer before the fuse reaches its maximum temperature and breaks.
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 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.
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.
Dunno. The breakdown voltage of vacuum is enormous. There might be several unknown parameters at play here which would increase the breakdown voltage of the air.
It might be but an urban legend, but the phenomenon sounds way too fun to not look into it (or to stop spreading it should it turn out as false, kinda like Santa)
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.
> 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.
Tbf an "impassable invisible forcefield" sounds really useful for various applications. If it was possible at all, someone would have done some research into it, surely?
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?
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.
I had the pleasure of operating some machines like that too. One was a hydraulic shear roughly the size of a school bus, and once you stomp the pedal there is absolutely no taking it back--it'll do a cycle and nothing can stop it. We also had a Buffalo Iron Worker which I managed to misalign a punch in once. A hefty chunk of HSS flew ~100ft across the shop and embedded itself in the steel siding. I don't know how it didn't hit me, because I was at the time occupying much of the solid angle. However the machine that scared me most was a giant drill press from the late 1800s that had a ~4' cast iron gear on top of the drill shaft which held enough inertia to keep the drill spinning for about a minute after the power was shut off.
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.
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
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.
Not at all. I've spent plenty of time (sessions exceeding an hour) in saunas that were >105F and >95% humidity (literally so much steam that it was continuously raining from the condensation).
Remember that when you get a fever, your internal body temp can jump to 103+ and stay there for days. Even at a wet bulb temperature above 110, it's going to take time for your internal temperature to heat up to that level. There's nothing "potentially in minutes" about it for humans that are used to the heat.
Sure, you do eventually have to get somewhere cooler. But a wet bulb temperature of 105F is not going to be fatal for a well adapted human even after a few hours.
Those do NOT occur regularly in the US at the same time (because the humidity peaks in the morning, but the temperature in the afternoon). Maybe in a few decades though.
35°C at 100% humidity is about the human survivability limit (at 6h exposure). This makes a lot of sense because humans generate ~100W of heat, but require their core temperature to stay constant-- if the environment is too hot and evaporation ineffective because of humidity, then your thermoregulation just breaks down and you die, just like from high fever.
Nope. A human that is regularly exposed to such environments has probably developed a strong cutaneous vasodilation response and can tolerate limited exposure just fine. Instead of a cold plunge in a frozen pond, they're doing a sauna. Human bodies are amazingly adaptable.
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".
I’m sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. 95% relative humidity means sweat won’t evaporate, and there is no evaporative cooling. 100F external temps are above cooling temps and near dangerous baseline body temperatures.
100+F + 95% relative humidity will literally kill people, regardless of adaptations. Fans won’t help.
Fatal core temperature ranges are so close, even baseline metabolic heat can kill someone from hyperthermia in those conditions.
In a general environmental sense, current estimates have 95F outside temps and 95% relative humidity being the point where mass die offs of mammals start to occur. It’s a major concern with global temperature changes [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107].
Skin temperatures > 95F (which will occur if air temp is 95F or higher and there is no evaporative cooling ability) inevitably lead to hyperthermia even in fit and acclimated individuals - even at rest
Most of the time, people just don’t realize what the actual relative humidity is. ‘Terribly humid’ is usually more like 60% RH.
95% is saturated, often foggy/misty.
‘At least it’s a dry heat’ in Deserts, which allows people to survive high temps, are often 5-10% relative humidity or even lower. There, the biggest challenge is staying hydrated enough to sustain the rapid loss of water. In some situations it’s possible to lose a gallon an hour. But it’s possible.
In 95% RH, that gallon makes no difference and you’ll flat out die instead.
The amount of arrogance in this thread about what temperatures become fatal is baffling. Hyperthermia is not something that kills you on the timeline of minutes or even hours at wet bulb temperatures of 100F+, or even 105F+.
Remember, when people get sick it's not typically fatal for them to hold a body temperature of 104 degrees, even if sustained for more than 24 hours. Being in a work environment at 95+% relative humidity and 100F is going to be unpleasant, but as long as you are well adapted to it and you get to somewhere cooler within a few hours you are going to be fine.
People push well beyond a wet bulb of 105F in saunas all the time, often sustained for 30+ minutes. I think if you had yourself ever been in a room that's 110F and 100% humidity (meaning it's literally raining continuously from condensation) you'd realize that it's really not that extreme of a temperature, and that it takes hours for your core to heat up to a place where you will be at risk of dying.
I know of at least one instance where several well acclimatized individuals died in less than 15 minutes in open air in the Grand Canyon above the Colorado River due to solar heating and 95% wet bulb humidity.
I’d argue you just haven’t actually been in those types of situations either. In that case I think they estimated 110ish air temps.
But maybe I’m misremembering - I heard it from the investigating safety officer though.
I have yet to see anyone actually able to work or function in actual 100% humidity and 100+ degrees temps for more than a few minutes before having serious problems.
I’ve seen plenty of people have problems in 60% humidity which everyone agreed was terrible. Mostly heat stroke.
People’s core temp is already just a hair under 100F, and even at rest are producing 100ish watts of thermal energy. It really doesn’t take much for it to start spiking if cooling is literally impossible.
It takes about 300 watt hours of energy to raise the body temperature of a human by 6 degrees. If your human is starting at 99 degrees, 6 degrees will put you at 105, which is where you'll start to have immediate problems. (At 104 you aren't going to be happy, but you are going to survive and you're not likely to sustain organ damage).
If we assume that you are putting out 100 watts, you've got 3 hours at a wet bulb of 100F before you start having risk of death (if you are well adjusted to the heat).
And yes, I spend time every month in Saunas and Hammams with extreme temperatures. My favorite room is 195 degrees and 45% humidity. That translates to something like 150 degree wet bulb temperature, and I can happily stay in that room for about 20 minutes. (though 60 minutes would probably kill me). I've also spent plenty of time in Hammams (30+ minute sessions) where the temperature was 110F and the humidity was 100% (which means the entire room is fog and it's constantly dripping everywhere, practically raining). These aren't elite extremes in the sauna world, you'll find saunas close to these conditions all over the world.
Those calculations are assuming the only heat input is from internal metabolic activity, not metabolic activity + heat transfer from the environment, yes?
If the environment is 95-105f we can assume no external heat transfer, but the environments you’re referring to seem to be well above that.
Based on some quick googling, it seems like surface area is on average 1.6 m^2 for women, and 1.9 m^2 for men. I get lost in the math, but there has to be significant heat transfer if it’s 15+F hotter than body temperature in the room yeah?
Well yeah, if you are in a 195 degree sauna with 45% humidity there's a ton of heat transfer, that's why people like them. And it would definitely be unsafe to hang out in them for too long. People who aren't well adjusted to that sort of environment might even start having trouble after 10 minutes.
I know people who can tolerate that environment for 30+ minutes without injury (And I regularly do 20-25 minute stretches myself), which is why I'm so confident that 105F and 100% humidity is tolerable for a period of at least multiple hours.
Yes, eventually you'll heat stroke and die, you can't just live in a sauna. But it's not going to "kill you in minutes" if you are used to it, which is what a lot of people in this thread seem to be implying.
With 100% humidity you definitely can't survive or function but with 95% at 100F exactly it's just barely feasible. That gives you just enough margin due to evaporative cooling that with sufficient air flow you can maintain a temperature of 97-98F via evaporative cooling. And importantly this only works in the shade. Outdoors it's unlikely to be feasible due to the rise in surface temperatures due to thermal radiation from the sun.
That of course requires a strong fan blowing and regular, heavy hydration to sustain but it's feasible. So it's workable in an industrial environment where you can adjust the environment enough to get by but outdoors in large wild spaces like the Grand Canyon (as per your example) it's unlikely to be survivable for long.
And notably in an indoor environment there is a big difference between an operator running a machine or vehicle and an individual under heavy exertion. The added thermal stress of heavy exertion makes it less survivable as well.
So in the end it only really works in factory settings because:
- There's no sun to add radiative heat.
- There's fans and ventilation to maintain evaporative cooling.
- Workers can take regular or semi-regular breaks in a cooler or lower humidity environment to recover some from the thermal stress and to recover water and electrolytes.
- Those workers can limit their activity to rates of exertion/heat production that don't exceed the limited evaporative cooling they have access to.
As soon as you remove one of those advantages or increase the temperature much above 100F or increase the RH above 95%, survivability becomes way less likely.
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.
That's certainly not the take away I have from the show. It inspired many to think for themselves and made science approachable and fun. They made a genuine effort to be scientific within the bounds of the show. I think they've done a great service to the field, personally. Can you cite any sources for Adam being a 'tool'? He seems like a high-energy kind of guy, but this is the first I've heard of him being disliked by crew. Usually I've heard the opposite; that he gets on well with other crew members.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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)
Or on the other side you remind me of a literal party trick - a rubber balloon filled with helium that's starting to deflate and thus has neutral buoyancy can be moved around without touching it. The charges on the surface of the balloon and on your hands repel.
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.
When they still did, they had an idea submission forum. I did post it there and the moderator responded with something close to "it's been submitted, not interesting, just try it yourself". I'm still annoyed at them for that stupid response.
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.
While you raise some valid points, you need 10kV to jump a 1cm gap. So in a domestic situation at the much lower voltage involved (130V / 250V) I imagine you don't need to worry so much about the air gap.
The care instructions and dust you mention sounds likely to be super important when you're casually touching live stuff while standing on a grounded floor.
In an electrostatic situation, the electrons can flow (almost) freely without the shoes / tyres and so a large differential between body / ground will not build up. With shoes, you'll need a large difference to build up (10kV? 20kV? More?) before it discharges.
Anyway, there is clearly a difference between these situations - even if the shoes don't provide magical protection. But the shoes are not magical, as you correctly describe.
The skin is very resistive, the body itself is not. There is a soldier who "won the darwin award" by taking the probes of a multi-meter and after measuring their skin resistance decided to measure their internal resistance.
After piercing the skin, the test current from the multimeter (9v) was sufficient to electrocute this person. Sadly it (apparently) was a fatal injury. I couldn't find a reference, but the logic makes sense (50V sufficient to kill normally, skin is most of the protection).
When dealing with electricity, having items which reduce the protection your skin offers (metal rings, moisturizer, etc) is a substantial risk.
Well, more correctly the difference needs to exceed the breakdown voltage of the insulation barrier. Or (depending on the insulator) some current might flow the entire time, but a limited amount.
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 always felt that this "wall" must have been composed of charged gas ions in a potential well. This would make it sort of a capacitor, and would explain why no large sparks or discharge were happening, even when the voltages involved must have been extremely high.
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.
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?
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.
Or perhaps I misunderstood, my reading was low humidity matters, but it is quite possible that I know in general for static high humidity shorts everything to ground and so you don't get much static - and thus probably skimmed that part more than I should have.
> 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.
Amusement parks are slightly more systematic about trying their best to not kill people than "let's see what happens if people interact with this known-deadly machine when we remove the part that makes it less deadly (i.e. the grounding)".
It's just a difference is scale of risk. For something closer: base jumping is still popular, no-harness climbing of tall buildings is still a thing on YouTube, crazy Russian groups still do pull-ups on construction cranes.
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.
You likely have HTTPS-only mode enabled in your browser(s). amasci.com doesn't have HTTPS configured and serves a certificate for (.*)eskimo.com. If your browser automatically rewrites all HTTP links to HTTPS, it'll throw these errors.
Try manually replacing https with http. Disabling HTTPS-only mode (or HTTPS Everywhere, or whatever is causing the rewrites) might also work.
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.
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.
I worked in a casino that had a wool carpet. When the carpet was new it was ridiculous the amount of static that it generated on you. I was wearing steel toe non slip and anti shock shoes too!
I quickly learned to hold my machine keys ring (3 inch wide ring) and tap it to the slot machine frame. Often a three inch violet spark would jump and I could even feel my clothes move. One time I even causing one of the slot machine player tracking system to reboot, it was that or me better it got the hit.
A manager said at a casino they used to work at they would spray fabric softener on the rugs to alleviate static. I don't know if it worked or not.
I lived in an area with extremely dry winters (dew points below -40). My bedroom was carpeted. Some mornings I would reach for the light switch and see a 2" bolt of white pain jump off my finger. It was like a strobe light. I learned to touch light switches with my elbow. Same bolt but less painful to take it on the elbow.
I learned to touch things with a metal object like a key, so the charge spreads out across the part of skin holding the object and the pain is less.
Van de Graaff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_de_Graaff_generator
The Daresbury Laboratory in the UK had a giant Van de Graaff generator housed in a high concrete tower. I remember staying on site and waking up in the middle of the night with a really creepy feeling that turned out to be caused by that thing operating.
The tower is empty now, there is a good view from the top floor though.
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're correct, but just for fun's sake:
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
So it's not the Amps that get you, but the Coulombs? Or is it the Joules?
Lethality of electricity is multi-dimensional, trying to reduce it to a single quantity does not really work (exposure time and electrical frequency are very important).
neither. even a shortcut saying like "total energy delivered" is not accurate, because it depends on how it is delivered and how it dissipates.
styropyro made a fascinating (if terrifying) video about it
Sounds a bit like fuse wire (except the frequency dependence)... There's both a current and a time component. High overloads can be tolerated for a very short time without blowing the fuse, while low overloads can be sustained for longer before the fuse reaches its maximum temperature and breaks.
It also matters where the arc lands. I leant over an electric fence (whim I thought was off) wearing wet swimming shorts to fetch a ball, once.
Never, ever again.
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 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.
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.
Dunno. The breakdown voltage of vacuum is enormous. There might be several unknown parameters at play here which would increase the breakdown voltage of the air.
It might be but an urban legend, but the phenomenon sounds way too fun to not look into it (or to stop spreading it should it turn out as false, kinda like Santa)
There are floating electrostatic experiments that are pretty cool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6bKDaZiy_k
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.
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.
Tbf an "impassable invisible forcefield" sounds really useful for various applications. If it was possible at all, someone would have done some research into it, surely?
I think we're saying the thing
Oh yeah we are, I think I'm just adding to your comment that even if 3M ignored it then someone would have researched it.
But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it and thus be unable to leave it ?
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?
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.
I had the pleasure of operating some machines like that too. One was a hydraulic shear roughly the size of a school bus, and once you stomp the pedal there is absolutely no taking it back--it'll do a cycle and nothing can stop it. We also had a Buffalo Iron Worker which I managed to misalign a punch in once. A hefty chunk of HSS flew ~100ft across the shop and embedded itself in the steel siding. I don't know how it didn't hit me, because I was at the time occupying much of the solid angle. However the machine that scared me most was a giant drill press from the late 1800s that had a ~4' cast iron gear on top of the drill shaft which held enough inertia to keep the drill spinning for about a minute after the power was shut off.
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.
And more practically is likely to be detected, when approaching it casually, by discharging it through the closest body part.
Got a link to one of those debunkings? (If it's so thoroughly debunked, it should be easy.)
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'd say styropyro. He'd be up for it. The issue is, 3M or similar would never let him approach one of their plants :D
ElectroBOOM!
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
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.
Not at all. I've spent plenty of time (sessions exceeding an hour) in saunas that were >105F and >95% humidity (literally so much steam that it was continuously raining from the condensation).
Remember that when you get a fever, your internal body temp can jump to 103+ and stay there for days. Even at a wet bulb temperature above 110, it's going to take time for your internal temperature to heat up to that level. There's nothing "potentially in minutes" about it for humans that are used to the heat.
Sure, you do eventually have to get somewhere cooler. But a wet bulb temperature of 105F is not going to be fatal for a well adapted human even after a few hours.
Nah. This doesn't pass the smell test.
Throughout much of the Southeastern United States, we regularly see Summer temps above 100F (37C), and humidity up to 90%.
One of the two Marine Corps training bases is in South Carolina where temps and humidity are often near these values and sometimes crest them.
Most of Florida frequently passes these values every Summer.
While it is not comfortable, I can assure you, most humans are able to exert themselves without being killed in minutes from this kind of exposure.
Those do NOT occur regularly in the US at the same time (because the humidity peaks in the morning, but the temperature in the afternoon). Maybe in a few decades though.
35°C at 100% humidity is about the human survivability limit (at 6h exposure). This makes a lot of sense because humans generate ~100W of heat, but require their core temperature to stay constant-- if the environment is too hot and evaporation ineffective because of humidity, then your thermoregulation just breaks down and you die, just like from high fever.
Nope. A human that is regularly exposed to such environments has probably developed a strong cutaneous vasodilation response and can tolerate limited exposure just fine. Instead of a cold plunge in a frozen pond, they're doing a sauna. Human bodies are amazingly adaptable.
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".
I’m sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. 95% relative humidity means sweat won’t evaporate, and there is no evaporative cooling. 100F external temps are above cooling temps and near dangerous baseline body temperatures.
100+F + 95% relative humidity will literally kill people, regardless of adaptations. Fans won’t help.
Fatal core temperature ranges are so close, even baseline metabolic heat can kill someone from hyperthermia in those conditions.
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10010916/#:~:text=F....]
In a general environmental sense, current estimates have 95F outside temps and 95% relative humidity being the point where mass die offs of mammals start to occur. It’s a major concern with global temperature changes [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107].
Skin temperatures > 95F (which will occur if air temp is 95F or higher and there is no evaporative cooling ability) inevitably lead to hyperthermia even in fit and acclimated individuals - even at rest
Most of the time, people just don’t realize what the actual relative humidity is. ‘Terribly humid’ is usually more like 60% RH.
95% is saturated, often foggy/misty.
‘At least it’s a dry heat’ in Deserts, which allows people to survive high temps, are often 5-10% relative humidity or even lower. There, the biggest challenge is staying hydrated enough to sustain the rapid loss of water. In some situations it’s possible to lose a gallon an hour. But it’s possible.
In 95% RH, that gallon makes no difference and you’ll flat out die instead.
The amount of arrogance in this thread about what temperatures become fatal is baffling. Hyperthermia is not something that kills you on the timeline of minutes or even hours at wet bulb temperatures of 100F+, or even 105F+.
Remember, when people get sick it's not typically fatal for them to hold a body temperature of 104 degrees, even if sustained for more than 24 hours. Being in a work environment at 95+% relative humidity and 100F is going to be unpleasant, but as long as you are well adapted to it and you get to somewhere cooler within a few hours you are going to be fine.
People push well beyond a wet bulb of 105F in saunas all the time, often sustained for 30+ minutes. I think if you had yourself ever been in a room that's 110F and 100% humidity (meaning it's literally raining continuously from condensation) you'd realize that it's really not that extreme of a temperature, and that it takes hours for your core to heat up to a place where you will be at risk of dying.
I know of at least one instance where several well acclimatized individuals died in less than 15 minutes in open air in the Grand Canyon above the Colorado River due to solar heating and 95% wet bulb humidity.
I’d argue you just haven’t actually been in those types of situations either. In that case I think they estimated 110ish air temps.
But maybe I’m misremembering - I heard it from the investigating safety officer though.
I have yet to see anyone actually able to work or function in actual 100% humidity and 100+ degrees temps for more than a few minutes before having serious problems.
I’ve seen plenty of people have problems in 60% humidity which everyone agreed was terrible. Mostly heat stroke.
People’s core temp is already just a hair under 100F, and even at rest are producing 100ish watts of thermal energy. It really doesn’t take much for it to start spiking if cooling is literally impossible.
It takes about 300 watt hours of energy to raise the body temperature of a human by 6 degrees. If your human is starting at 99 degrees, 6 degrees will put you at 105, which is where you'll start to have immediate problems. (At 104 you aren't going to be happy, but you are going to survive and you're not likely to sustain organ damage).
If we assume that you are putting out 100 watts, you've got 3 hours at a wet bulb of 100F before you start having risk of death (if you are well adjusted to the heat).
And yes, I spend time every month in Saunas and Hammams with extreme temperatures. My favorite room is 195 degrees and 45% humidity. That translates to something like 150 degree wet bulb temperature, and I can happily stay in that room for about 20 minutes. (though 60 minutes would probably kill me). I've also spent plenty of time in Hammams (30+ minute sessions) where the temperature was 110F and the humidity was 100% (which means the entire room is fog and it's constantly dripping everywhere, practically raining). These aren't elite extremes in the sauna world, you'll find saunas close to these conditions all over the world.
Those calculations are assuming the only heat input is from internal metabolic activity, not metabolic activity + heat transfer from the environment, yes?
If the environment is 95-105f we can assume no external heat transfer, but the environments you’re referring to seem to be well above that.
Based on some quick googling, it seems like surface area is on average 1.6 m^2 for women, and 1.9 m^2 for men. I get lost in the math, but there has to be significant heat transfer if it’s 15+F hotter than body temperature in the room yeah?
Well yeah, if you are in a 195 degree sauna with 45% humidity there's a ton of heat transfer, that's why people like them. And it would definitely be unsafe to hang out in them for too long. People who aren't well adjusted to that sort of environment might even start having trouble after 10 minutes.
I know people who can tolerate that environment for 30+ minutes without injury (And I regularly do 20-25 minute stretches myself), which is why I'm so confident that 105F and 100% humidity is tolerable for a period of at least multiple hours.
Yes, eventually you'll heat stroke and die, you can't just live in a sauna. But it's not going to "kill you in minutes" if you are used to it, which is what a lot of people in this thread seem to be implying.
With 100% humidity you definitely can't survive or function but with 95% at 100F exactly it's just barely feasible. That gives you just enough margin due to evaporative cooling that with sufficient air flow you can maintain a temperature of 97-98F via evaporative cooling. And importantly this only works in the shade. Outdoors it's unlikely to be feasible due to the rise in surface temperatures due to thermal radiation from the sun.
That of course requires a strong fan blowing and regular, heavy hydration to sustain but it's feasible. So it's workable in an industrial environment where you can adjust the environment enough to get by but outdoors in large wild spaces like the Grand Canyon (as per your example) it's unlikely to be survivable for long.
And notably in an indoor environment there is a big difference between an operator running a machine or vehicle and an individual under heavy exertion. The added thermal stress of heavy exertion makes it less survivable as well.
So in the end it only really works in factory settings because:
- There's no sun to add radiative heat.
- There's fans and ventilation to maintain evaporative cooling.
- Workers can take regular or semi-regular breaks in a cooler or lower humidity environment to recover some from the thermal stress and to recover water and electrolytes.
- Those workers can limit their activity to rates of exertion/heat production that don't exceed the limited evaporative cooling they have access to.
As soon as you remove one of those advantages or increase the temperature much above 100F or increase the RH above 95%, survivability becomes way less likely.
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
We could design the experiment. Then try to reduce the experiment to a cheap, convenient form.
Surely somebody has done at least that.
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.
I remember hearing about this in the mid 2000s, someone at Brookhaven (US DOE/Army) jumped on filing a patent for it and dubbed it a plasma window.
They found a use for it in particle accelerators to partition off sections that are under vacuum
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.
That's certainly not the take away I have from the show. It inspired many to think for themselves and made science approachable and fun. They made a genuine effort to be scientific within the bounds of the show. I think they've done a great service to the field, personally. Can you cite any sources for Adam being a 'tool'? He seems like a high-energy kind of guy, but this is the first I've heard of him being disliked by crew. Usually I've heard the opposite; that he gets on well with other crew members.
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160308070438/http://centxesdas...
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.
> the sort of people who believe in any other conspiracy theory or magical belief system
Bad news: this has gone completely mainstream. We're deep into government by conspiracy theorists.
> 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.
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
Ah, they migrated away for winter.
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.
> 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?
We had plenty of UFO sightings over the last couple of years. Remember the navy pilots? The drones a few months back?
Big Foot, sadly, has been displaced by climate change and was forced to relocate to Canada
I just assumed those were made up in an attempt to get more budget for the military.
Not sure about Bigfoot but isn't it pretty well-established that most UFO sightings were the SR71?
They even went home and came back the next day. Why not bring a camcorder along?
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.
This reads like a good SCP.
There's a lot of interesting ideas in the experiments section, here: http://amasci.com/freenrg/iontest.html
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.
It sounds vaguely like the Invisible Gorilla Experiment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Gorilla
I'll see what I can find
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.
Should the damage become a problem, they'd likely do it, but not until the damage proves more costly than the cost of preventing it.
The Board <denies/demands> comprehensive analysis of this <occurrence/breach>.
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
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.
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)
Or on the other side you remind me of a literal party trick - a rubber balloon filled with helium that's starting to deflate and thus has neutral buoyancy can be moved around without touching it. The charges on the surface of the balloon and on your hands repel.
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.
When they still did, they had an idea submission forum. I did post it there and the moderator responded with something close to "it's been submitted, not interesting, just try it yourself". I'm still annoyed at them for that stupid response.
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.
While you raise some valid points, you need 10kV to jump a 1cm gap. So in a domestic situation at the much lower voltage involved (130V / 250V) I imagine you don't need to worry so much about the air gap.
The care instructions and dust you mention sounds likely to be super important when you're casually touching live stuff while standing on a grounded floor.
In an electrostatic situation, the electrons can flow (almost) freely without the shoes / tyres and so a large differential between body / ground will not build up. With shoes, you'll need a large difference to build up (10kV? 20kV? More?) before it discharges.
Anyway, there is clearly a difference between these situations - even if the shoes don't provide magical protection. But the shoes are not magical, as you correctly describe.
> 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!
The skin is very resistive, the body itself is not. There is a soldier who "won the darwin award" by taking the probes of a multi-meter and after measuring their skin resistance decided to measure their internal resistance.
After piercing the skin, the test current from the multimeter (9v) was sufficient to electrocute this person. Sadly it (apparently) was a fatal injury. I couldn't find a reference, but the logic makes sense (50V sufficient to kill normally, skin is most of the protection).
When dealing with electricity, having items which reduce the protection your skin offers (metal rings, moisturizer, etc) is a substantial risk.
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”.
Well, more correctly the difference needs to exceed the breakdown voltage of the insulation barrier. Or (depending on the insulator) some current might flow the entire time, but a limited amount.
Good point, a repulsive effect would have to be the same charge sign so no bug zapper.
Conduct... to where?
To your body.
No :) There must be a difference in electrical potential for current to flow between two points.
If the body is insulated from ground, the body is at the same potential. No current flows. No material conducts anything :)
For the same reasons, high voltage repairs can be done live from a helicopter: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9YmFHAFYwmY
Around 1:10 you can see the lineman connect the mains to the helicopter, to neutralize any potential difference.
After that, the lineman and the helicopter are at the same potential as the cable, so no current flows.
If someone dropped a line from the heli to the ground however.. zap!
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 was wrong, if you are the same charge you will be repelled. Opposites attract.
I always felt that this "wall" must have been composed of charged gas ions in a potential well. This would make it sort of a capacitor, and would explain why no large sparks or discharge were happening, even when the voltages involved must have been extremely high.
Falcon Space have been attempting to replicate it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSsX74X_BmA
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.
Silly physicists spent generations trying to confine plasma with magnets and lasers when all along we could have just used plastic wrap.
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?
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?
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.
Or perhaps I misunderstood, my reading was low humidity matters, but it is quite possible that I know in general for static high humidity shorts everything to ground and so you don't get much static - and thus probably skimmed that part more than I should have.
You can count on 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.
The part about "throwing bolts" reminds me of the plot in Roadside Picnic.
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.
Amusement parks have killed people in the past, yet they're still queuing up to the machines able to do the most damage.
Amusement parks are slightly more systematic about trying their best to not kill people than "let's see what happens if people interact with this known-deadly machine when we remove the part that makes it less deadly (i.e. the grounding)".
It's just a difference is scale of risk. For something closer: base jumping is still popular, no-harness climbing of tall buildings is still a thing on YouTube, crazy Russian groups still do pull-ups on construction cranes.
Dang, where's MythBusters when you need them (RIP Grant Imahara)
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.
Time for a YouTube video to be made
Can this be used in a bank vault?
A large steel door is a much easier and more reliable barrier
“So that’s what an invisible barrier looks like.”
We can turn beans into peas.
What's wrong on my end? I get this from both Firefox and Chromium:
Now "isdownorjustme" tells me amasci is down: I'm not too sure what's going on.You likely have HTTPS-only mode enabled in your browser(s). amasci.com doesn't have HTTPS configured and serves a certificate for (.*)eskimo.com. If your browser automatically rewrites all HTTP links to HTTPS, it'll throw these errors.
Try manually replacing https with http. Disabling HTTPS-only mode (or HTTPS Everywhere, or whatever is causing the rewrites) might also work.
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.