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".
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".
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.
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.
It might be but an urban legend, but the phenomenon sounds way too fun to not look into it (or to stop spreading it should it turn out as false, kinda like Santa)
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.
That's got to be the key here. Human perception is known to be logarithmic in so many other ways.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-ma...
(Even if that feeling is misplaced and uninformed)
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.
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?
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.