4 ms·

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 someh

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 2y 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
- tuetuopay 2y ago
  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
- fakedang 2y ago
  ElectroBOOM!
EncomLab 2y ago
This pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.
- mmcgaha 2y 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 2y 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.
    - margalabargala 2y 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 2y ago
        This is an electrostatic field, which has no magnetic component in the classical model.
        HelloNurse 2y ago
        And more practically is likely to be detected, when approaching it casually, by discharging it through the closest body part.
    - zelon88 2y 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.
- ghusbands 2y ago
  Got a link to one of those debunkings? (If it's so thoroughly debunked, it should be easy.)
1propionyl 2y 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.
- PicassoCTs 2y ago
  But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it and thus be unable to leave it ?
- maushu 2y 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.
  - TeMPOraL 2y 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.
hinkley 2y 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. 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?
petee 2y ago
What do you make of the statement that it pulled in a fly, potentially a bird, yet repels humans?
- QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
  Maybe it’s working by shocking muscles- it’s mostly acting on creatures not objects

umvi 2y 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

tuetuopay 2y ago
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
fakedang 2y ago
ElectroBOOM!

EncomLab 2y ago

This pops up at least once a month and has been thoroughly debunked.

mmcgaha 2y 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 2y 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.
  - margalabargala 2y 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 2y ago
      This is an electrostatic field, which has no magnetic component in the classical model.
      - HelloNurse 2y ago
        And more practically is likely to be detected, when approaching it casually, by discharging it through the closest body part.
  - zelon88 2y 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.
ghusbands 2y ago
Got a link to one of those debunkings? (If it's so thoroughly debunked, it should be easy.)

1propionyl 2y 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.

PicassoCTs 2y ago
But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it and thus be unable to leave it ?
maushu 2y 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.
- TeMPOraL 2y 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.

hinkley 2y 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. 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?

petee 2y ago

What do you make of the statement that it pulled in a fly, potentially a bird, yet repels humans?

QuadmasterXLII 2y ago
Maybe it’s working by shocking muscles- it’s mostly acting on creatures not objects