_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
KennyBlanken wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
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.
QuadmasterXLII wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
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
rep_lodsb wrote 5 hours 37 min ago:
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.
1-6 wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Time for a YouTube video to be made
sans_souse wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
There's a lot of interesting ideas in the experiments section, here:
URI [1]: http://amasci.com/freenrg/iontest.html
st-keller wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
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?
ericye16 wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
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.
hinkley wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the mechanical
energy in the system is it not? Iâm surprised they let it zap like
that video and donât 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.
littlestymaar wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
> All that static discharge is coming at the expense of the
mechanical energy in the system is it not? Iâm surprised they let
it zap like that video and donât 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).
hinkley wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I was thinking less of energy efficiency and more of containment.
Possibly damage reduction.
anotherevan wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
âSo thatâs what an invisible barrier looks like.â
swayvil wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
We can turn beans into peas.
cmpalmer52 wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
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
youâd 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
youâd 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 âbumpâ 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. Iâd gone through most of the reel at a very high
speed and acquired its charge.
I reached for the switch plate and shot an 8-10â arcing discharge
between the plate and my fingers.
Lesson learned, I held the switch plate from then on.
wumms wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
Did you finish your shift that night? (Some 2cm arc from an electric
fence brought me to my knees one time.)
HappMacDonald wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
@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.
idiotsecant wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
You had less voltage, but whole lots more current than parent post.
flerchin wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
Van de graaff generators discharge with painful shocks. I would expect
something like described in the article to kill someone.
VikingCoder wrote 9 hours 56 min ago:
[1] "The article says that because of the insulating nature of the
floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
URI [1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53985/was-an-in...
BenjiWiebe wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
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.
more_corn wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
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.
rich_sasha wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
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.
danparsonson wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
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 ( [1] )
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/pgV8l5yLadQ
dcminter wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
I suppose you could take advantage of diamagnetism if a moving charge
was involved... it works for frogs :)
hammock wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
Can this be used in a bank vault?
danparsonson wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
A large steel door is a much easier and more reliable barrier
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
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".
umvi wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
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
petee wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
What do you make of the statement that it pulled in a fly,
potentially a bird, yet repels humans?
QuadmasterXLII wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Maybe itâs working by shocking muscles- itâs mostly acting on
creatures not objects
hinkley wrote 9 hours 16 min ago:
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.
Wouldnât 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?
EncomLab wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
This pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.
mmcgaha wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
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.
devnullbrain wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
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.
zelon88 wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
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.
margalabargala wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
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.
AlotOfReading wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
This is an electrostatic field, which has no magnetic
component in the classical model.
1propionyl wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
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.
petesergeant wrote 37 min ago:
> 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.
RajT88 wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
Scotch tape produces X-Rays, so something like this feels similarly
plausible: [1] (Even if that feeling is misplaced and uninformed)
URI [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-...
maushu wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
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.
Workaccount2 wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
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.
TeMPOraL wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
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.
TimTheTinker wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
> 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.
PicassoCTs wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it
and thus be unable to leave it ?
silisili wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
> 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.
airstrike wrote 11 hours 1 min ago:
The Board comprehensive analysis of this .
swayvil wrote 11 hours 15 min ago:
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?
ibizaman wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
This reads like a good SCP.
jcarrano wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
We are talking about a sci-fi style force-field here! I'd be surprised
if the military didn't secretly experiment with this.
bluGill wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
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?
TeMPOraL wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
> 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.
andrewflnr wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
> 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.
bluGill wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
water would be high humidity not low.
TeMPOraL wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
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.
swayvil wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
You can count on that.
IAmGraydon wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
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
â 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.
schmidtleonard wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
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
kragen wrote 11 hours 9 min ago:
> Picture yourself inside a gigantic, electrified sphere â 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).
Arnavion wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem
kragen wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
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.)
1970-01-01 wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
Selling tickets on those non-humid days would have been more profitable
than fixing anything.
lxgr wrote 11 hours 36 min ago:
Static discharge from machines like that has killed people in the
past, so Iâm not sure if thatâs the best idea.
dyauspitr wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
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.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
Ever see an electromagnet crane at a junk yard? [1] You can make one
yourself with a nail, some copper wire, and a battery.
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ...
dyauspitr wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
Can an electromagnetic move organic material?
jhgorrell wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
Extremely powerful fields can levitate a frog - so yes.
URI [1]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/how-did-y...
kragen wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
Probably not in a useful way; the induced currents would produce
far too much heat.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
If it's strong enough, probably. I mean, MRIs kind of work that
way.
SigmundA wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
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.
swayvil wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
That's pretty darn far from what we're talking about here. The
comparison is absurd.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
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.
function_seven wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
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.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
The article is about an electrostatic field. That's far from
sci-fi.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field
function_seven wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
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.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 10 hours 30 min ago:
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.
baggy_trough wrote 11 hours 51 min ago:
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?
VikingCoder wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
[1] "The article says that because of the insulating nature of the
floor and and footwear, no discharges occurred."
URI [1]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53985/was-an-in...
Noumenon72 wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
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.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
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.
baggy_trough wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Good point, a repulsive effect would have to be the same charge
sign so no bug zapper.
bongodongobob wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Conduct... to where?
gridspy wrote 10 hours 10 min ago:
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.
bluGill wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
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.
rUsHeYaFuBu wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
> 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!
throw-qqqqq wrote 6 hours 55 min ago:
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
âfloatingâ.
boxed wrote 12 hours 1 min ago:
I wish Mythbusters still existed to test stuff like this.
sonofhans wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
Can you imagine the expense? âWe need 1 mile of poly film, 20-feet
wide â¦â
qingcharles wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
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.
harrall wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
Rolls like those were common in the warehouse at the place I
worked.
SequoiaHope wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
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: [1] Or here is a 20
foot wide roll 1/10th of a mile long: [2] Based on the cost of the
roll from McMaster, a wider roll with the same cost basis would be
$2000.
URI [1]: https://www.mcmaster.com/19575T43
URI [2]: https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-20063/Plastic-Sheet...
observationist wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
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.
littlestymaar wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
> 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 â¦
danparsonson wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
And once you'd worked it out, you could buy a yacht with a
force field!
tmjdev wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
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.
dekhn wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
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.
TeMPOraL wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
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!
dekhn wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
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.
gopher_space wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
> 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.
empathy_m wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
I think the disappearing polymorph stories are also pretty spooky.
These have real-life impacts, like with ritonavir.
MarkusQ wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
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.
empathy_m wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
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: [1] )
URI [1]: https://www.natap.org/1998/norvirupdate.html
toast0 wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
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.
swayvil wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
It reminds me of that experiment where they had an audience of 1000
focus their attention upon a chair on a stage.
krackers wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
What happened?
swayvil wrote 7 hours 46 min ago:
The chair got chairier.
I don't recall what that means.
egypturnash wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
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.
swayvil wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
I'll see what I can find
avidiax wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
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 . . .
shepherdjerred wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
URI [1]: https://www.xkcd.com/2572/
tedunangst wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
They even went home and came back the next day. Why not bring a
camcorder along?
hammock wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
What does this comment have to do with OP?
mrandish wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
> 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.
dist-epoch wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
> It is based on known physical principles
What exactly does it repel against a human? And why would it repel
instead of discharge?
tshaddox wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
I'd say UFO mania is more intense and more mainstream than ever.
Still no remotely compelling physical evidence, of course.
aftbit wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
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.
lxgr wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
On the other hand, we just witnessed a nationwide drone panic, and
not for a lack of video evidenceâ¦
An odd phenomenon being rare and hard to document is neither proof
nor evidence of absence for it existing.
EA-3167 wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
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.
lxgr wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
I personally really wouldn't bet on there being less UFO
believers these days than before the ubiquitous availability of
cameras.
EA-3167 wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
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.
jsight wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
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.
EA-3167 wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
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.
mrandish wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
> 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.
jacoblambda wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
Not just one thread.
ANTEC '97 Conference Proceedings, CRC Press, pages 1310-1313. [1] 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.
URI [1]: https://www.google.com/books/edition/SPE_ANTEC_1997_Proceedi...
Animats wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
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]
URI [1]: https://www.walmart.com/search?q=anti-static+tinsel
URI [2]: https://www.takk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2023-TAKK-...
hinkley wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
I miss MythBusters.
KennyBlanken wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
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.
Aurornis wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
> 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.
comex wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
> 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 âwallâ 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.
joemi wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
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?
jacoblambda wrote 10 hours 27 min ago:
> 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.
dist-epoch wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
> 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.
bluGill wrote 10 hours 3 min ago:
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.
dotancohen wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
In the fine article it is mentioned that the plant manager
debated whether to fix it or sell tickets.
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
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.
jacoblambda wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
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.
dotancohen wrote 10 hours 39 min ago:
That is what grants are for. And DARPA when something more
specific, like this, is to be investigated.
giantg2 wrote 10 hours 10 min ago:
"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.
sunshinesnacks wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
According to [1] , 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.
URI [1]: https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_index
pixl97 wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
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.
jacoblambda wrote 10 hours 21 min ago:
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.
sunshinesnacks wrote 7 hours 34 min ago:
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: [1] .
URI [1]: https://www.ohsa.com.au/services/heat-stress-monitorin...
jacoblambda wrote 6 hours 18 min ago:
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".
sans_souse wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
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!
ambicapter wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
That job sounds like literal hell on earth.
sunshinesnacks wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
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.
sans_souse wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
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.
onlypassingthru wrote 7 hours 7 min ago:
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.
dylan604 wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
> 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F.
So just a typical summer day in Texas
swayvil wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
We could design the experiment. Then try to reduce the experiment
to a cheap, convenient form.
Surely somebody has done at least that.
Mistletoe wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
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.
colechristensen wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
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.
ceejayoz wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
Yeah, my local news had a clip that was clearly an American
Airlines tail logo.
giantrobot wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
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.
baxtr wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
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.
mrguyorama wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
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.
Mistletoe wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
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
simpleintheory wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
Previously discussed:
- [1] (2018)
- [2] (2013)
- [3] (2011)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299441
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052
URI [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335
giantrobot wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
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.
DIR <- back to front page