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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Bill Beaty's site was and still is amazing. It sparked my interest (and lifelong hobby) in high voltage back in the late 90s. Some of his essays (and ascii) art explaining concepts like coherence (http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html) still stick with me today.

As for the electrostatic wall story... it's fun but I don't believe it.

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I ate that site up when I was young. I was 12 in 1996, and by that time had already decided on a career in robotics. All the little tech projects there kept me engaged. I built a Tesla Coil after the site inspired me, and today I work in robotics in Silicon Valley.

I’m struck now with how much power one site has to engage and help so many people. I hope that I can share enough of my own goofy hobbies [1] to help a new generation learn what inspires them.

[1] http://reboot.love

I also spent hours on that site when I was ~12, in 2007! Now doing an MEng...

I feel like the pre-monetization Internet had a lot more of these sites. Or at least they weren't drowned out by the noise of a-b test optimized attention grabbing time sinks as much.

I've often wondered what'd happen if one were to make a search engine, and site catalogue (similar to early yahoo) that'd only take sites that do not match easylist.

You'd have a set of sites without any tracking or ads, and you might have it much easier to find high-quality sites like these.

Sounds like a brilliant idea. I'd use it.

I was 9 in 1996, and I remember reading this article over and over again for years, and making attempts to build a forcefield of my own.

It's still going! Latest:

- video of a tiny version https://youtu.be/vL3mnidBkeQ

- someone claims that objects do bounce off it https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4jb24s/what_are_...

- someone claims that others made accidental forcefields https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7kv54c/til_a...

After twenty years I finally tried a forcefield experiment: HVDC supply hooked to perfmetal electrodes as mentioned on Reddit. Nope, the high-field gap has no effect on intruding sticks, or even blocks nylon filaments. And reducing the gap just triggers big sparks. (But maybe it needs some 100Meg resistors, to stabilize it like an NE-2 neon bulb?)

For anyone looking for just the money diagram, ctrl+f "SOMEONE GETS IT RIGHT" in the link above.

I first saw a version of that diagram just a couple of months ago at 34c3 in this _excellent_ talk on synchrotrons and free electron lasers[1] which delivered more than one such "aha!" moment. It's a great diagram, and it's a very worthwhile talk.

1 - https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-8832-free_electron_lasers

http://amasci.com/miscon/coherenc.html#pinhole

Same! I built a van der graff generator loosely based on his. A great portion of my young adulthood was consumed by Bill Beaty's site and Simon Field's "Scitoys" website. I might have been on my way to becoming a scientist, but life doesn't always go how you expect.

I hope his site always keeps that 1996 era look to it. :)

One of his pages that I never forgot was the one on Traffic Waves:

http://trafficwaves.org/

I would tell people for years that we could alleviate traffic in LA if we paid small fleets of cars to drive a certain way and got laughed at. Well, now there's this(cited in the page above):

"A Single Autonomous Car Has a Huge Impact on Alleviating Traffic"

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607841/a-single-autonomou...

I was just wondering about those stupid wiggly snakes yesterday, passing by laser labs in MIT's basement, and wondering how little sense that model made. Thank you for sharing this explanation.

TLDR for others: coherent = as if from point source.

Thank you. I’ve been looking for a better explanation than wiggly snakes for thirty years.

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