Sorry for bringing something I found on Reddit to Hubski, but I figured we might get more thoughtful conversation on this topic here in this community.
Caveats: Yeah, the site is from the 1990's, yeah, the sources are questionable, etc.
BUT, dear Hubski, are there other phenomena, research, etc, that might corroborate this experience? What's happening in electrostatics? And force fields?
Let's use this article's base premise as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion of the current state of force field technology. What have you got?
Well, you're looking at basically a crazy van de Graaf generator. It's the sort of thing where it's nice that they're talking about it in happy, "interesting" terms because if you walked in there without insulated shoes it would kill you fucking dead. That's "lightning bolt" territory. You take that shit to ground and... That's 2 megavolts. So yeah. I totally buy everything about this, including the cavalier attitude of Dave. I also don't want to be anywhere near it, thanks. I've messed with the electric fields you get with that much energy and you can feel the voltage trying to kill you.With a 200kV @ 12" measurement device, the voltage measurements were off the scale and he was still 20 feet away from the web! For the meter to be pegged at that distance, the amount of static electricity had to be in the Megavolt range. He thought to himself "Van de Graaff would be proud!"
The "force field" part of the story is the one that sticks in my craw... how, physically, does electricity/static, etc, create an impenetrable field? A wall, of sorts. And yeah... I think there are probably more than a few of us here on Hubski who have played with Tesla coils, big banks of capacitors, etc. And survived. I remember wanting to turn the neon lights off in the garage where we were tuning our Tesla coil, going to the light switch, and finding they were already off. The air was... dare I say it?... electric!
It's called Coulomb force. You can calculate it here. Let's put some numbers to it: Here's a nice Van de Graaff generator. it puts out 400kV. What is that in coulombs? According to this nice unaccredited Earthlink page, you'll get on the order of 7 microcoulombs. Reading down the page further, that thing pushing against something grounded (you know you're an engineer if you've ever approximated a horse as a sphere), you get about 3 newtons of force... or about 12 lb of force. How much force does it take to ? Well, considering that the above "12 pound" VdG generator is kickin' it at 400kV, and we're assuming our magic test is producing "megavolt range" static electricity, somewhere upwards of 20 lbs isn't at all weird. Again, I'd rather read about it than touch it. Van de Graaff generators are spooky when they're on purpose. When they're by accident - and sticking birds to things - I want to watch through something dielectric.literally "peel" himself off of the invisible wall
There was this mysterious field of static outside Google's London office a while back.