9 ms·
Invisible Electrostatic Wall at 3M plant (1996)
- giantrobot 2y agoI 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.
- simpleintheory 2y agoPreviously discussed: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16299441 (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5387052 (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274335 (2011)
- avidiax 2y agoEver 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 . . .
- Mistletoe 2y agoBigfoot 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 2y agoA 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.
- baxtr 2y agoI 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.
- Mistletoe 2y agoMy 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
- gambiting 2y agoAh, they migrated away for winter.
- mrguyorama 2y agoIt 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.
- ceejayoz 2y agoYeah, my local news had a clip that was clearly an American Airlines tail logo.
- giantrobot 2y agoThat'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.
- CuriousCosmic 2y agoNot just one thread. ANTEC '97 Conference Proceedings, CRC Press, pages 1310-1313. https://www.google.com/books/edition/SPE_ANTEC_1997_Proceedings/uuBHUl4UNekC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1310 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.
- swayvil 2y agoWe could design the experiment. Then try to reduce the experiment to a cheap, convenient form. Surely somebody has done at least that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sunshinesnacks 2y agoAccording to https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_index 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.
- dylan604 2y ago> 100 deg F with 95% RH is a heat index of 185 F. So just a typical summer day in Texas
- lxgr 2y agoOn 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.
- EA-3167 2y agoI 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 2y agoI personally really wouldn't bet on there being less UFO believers these days than before the ubiquitous availability of cameras.
- EA-3167 2y agoI 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.
- mrandish 2y 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.
- _ea1k 2y agoAt 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.
- tshaddox 2y agoI'd say UFO mania is more intense and more mainstream than ever. Still no remotely compelling physical evidence, of course.
- aftbit 2y agoI'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.
- mrandish 2y 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 2y ago> It is based on known physical principles What exactly does it repel against a human? And why would it repel instead of discharge?
- hammock 2y agoWhat does this comment have to do with OP?
- tedunangst 2y agoThey even went home and came back the next day. Why not bring a camcorder along?
- shepherdjerred 2y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/2572/ https://www.xkcd.com/2572/
- wombatpm 2y agoWe 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
- t-3 2y agoI just assumed those were made up in an attempt to get more budget for the military.
- stackghost 2y agoNot sure about Bigfoot but isn't it pretty well-established that most UFO sightings were the SR71?
- tmjdev 2y agoI'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 2y agoI'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.
- swayvil 2y agoIt reminds me of that experiment where they had an audience of 1000 focus their attention upon a chair on a stage.
- krackers 2y agoWhat happened?
- swayvil 2y agoThe chair got chairier. I don't recall what that means.
- egypturnash 2y ago
- boxed 2y agoI wish Mythbusters still existed to test stuff like this.
- sonofhans 2y agoCan you imagine the expense? “We need 1 mile of poly film, 20-feet wide …”
- SequoiaHope 2y agoA 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 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-Sheeting/Clear-Poly-Sheeting-1-Mil-20-x-400 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.
- observationist 2y agoAn 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 2y 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 …
- baggy_trough 2y agoWouldn'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?
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoYeah 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.
- bongodongobob 2y agoConduct... to where?
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoTo your body.
- throw-qqqqq 2y agoNo :) 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 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!
- gridspy 2y agoWhen 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.
- dyauspitr 2y agoIf 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 2y agoEver see an electromagnet crane at a junk yard? https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ25ldGljIGNyYW5l https://youtube.com/watch?v=XBWy9gzGGd4&pp=ygUVZWxlY3Ryb21hZ... You can make one yourself with a nail, some copper wire, and a battery.
- swayvil 2y agoThat's pretty darn far from what we're talking about here. The comparison is absurd.
- rUsHeYaFuBu 2y agoHow 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 2y agoOf 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 2y agoThe article is about an electrostatic field. That's far from sci-fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_field
- 2y ago
- 1970-01-01 2y agoSelling tickets on those non-humid days would have been more profitable than fixing anything.
- lxgr 2y agoStatic discharge from machines like that has killed people in the past, so I’m not sure if that’s the best idea.
- viraptor 2y agoAmusement parks have killed people in the past, yet they're still queuing up to the machines able to do the most damage.
- lxgr 2y agoAmusement 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)".
- viraptor 2y agoIt'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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- IAmGraydon 2y agoThe 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.
- kragen 2y ago> 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).
- Arnavion 2y agoYes, 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem
- jcarrano 2y agoWe are talking about a sci-fi style force-field here! I'd be surprised if the military didn't secretly experiment with this.
- swayvil 2y agoYou can count on that.
- bluGill 2y agoUnless 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 2y 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.
- bluGill 2y agowater would be high humidity not low.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoSecond 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.
- ibizaman 2y agoThis reads like a good SCP.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoWhat's wrong on my end? I get this from both Firefox and Chromium: Firefox: Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to amasci.com. Chromium: https://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html Now "isdownorjustme" tells me amasci is down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/amasci.com?proto=https I'm not too sure what's going on.
- jeroenhd 2y agoYou 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.
- swayvil 2y agoA sheet of plastic. With a heavy static charge. Moving at 10mph. Assumedly in the vicinity of a big ground. Is that the whole experiment?
- airstrike 2y agoThe Board <denies/demands> comprehensive analysis of this <occurrence/breach>.
- silisili 2y 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.
- Workaccount2 2y agoI 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 2y agoMaybe 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
- EncomLab 2y agoThis pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.
- mmcgaha 2y agoI 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 2y ago
- hammock 2y agoCan this be used in a bank vault?
- danparsonson 2y agoA large steel door is a much easier and more reliable barrier
- rich_sasha 2y agoWhy 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.
- dcminter 2y agoI suppose you could take advantage of diamagnetism if a moving charge was involved... it works for frogs :)
- danparsonson 2y agoIt'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 https://youtu.be/pgV8l5yLadQ)
- dcminter 2y agoOr 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.
- more_corn 2y agoReminder 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.
- flerchin 2y agoVan de graaff generators discharge with painful shocks. I would expect something like described in the article to kill someone.
- VikingCoder 2y agohttps://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53985/was-an-invisible-electrostatic-wall-generated-at-a-plastic-tape-factory-in-augus 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."
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoIn 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.
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoI was wrong, if you are the same charge you will be repelled. Opposites attract.
- cmpalmer52 2y agoReminds 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.
- wumms 2y agoDid you finish your shift that night? (Some 2cm arc from an electric fence brought me to my knees one time.)
- idiotsecant 2y agoYou had less voltage, but whole lots more current than parent post.
- HappMacDonald 2y 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.
- kadoban 2y ago
- anotherevan 2y ago“So that’s what an invisible barrier looks like.”
- swayvil 2y agoWe can turn beans into peas.
- hinkley 2y agoAll 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.
- littlestymaar 2y ago> 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).
- hinkley 2y agoI was thinking less of energy efficiency and more of containment. Possibly damage reduction.
- littlestymaar 2y agoShould the damage become a problem, they'd likely do it, but not until the damage proves more costly than the cost of preventing it.
- ericye16 2y agoIt'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.
- st-keller 2y agoWow - 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?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sans_souse 2y agoThere's a lot of interesting ideas in the experiments section, here: http://amasci.com/freenrg/iontest.html http://amasci.com/freenrg/iontest.html
- 1-6 2y agoTime for a YouTube video to be made
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoElectric 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 2y agoIf 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.
- KennyBlanken 2y agoYet 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.
- raydiak 2y agoSilly physicists spent generations trying to confine plasma with magnets and lasers when all along we could have just used plastic wrap.
- UncleSlacky 2y agoFalcon Space have been attempting to replicate it recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSsX74X_BmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSsX74X_BmA
- stuff4ben 2y agoDang, where's MythBusters when you need them (RIP Grant Imahara)
- Kevin-Xi 2y agoThe part about "throwing bolts" reminds me of the plot in Roadside Picnic.
- pontifier 2y agoI 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.