Try this:
You will need two cell phones, or a cell phone and a land line, and a large piece of aluminum foil. First call one cell phone from the other phone, just to make sure everything is working properly. Next, wrap that cell phone in the aluminum foil, completely enclosing it. Now, call the enclosed cell phone. Write me a comment and tell me what happened!!!
If you did this correctly, you created a Faraday cage around your phone. Here's how it works. As you might remember, cell phones work by receiving radio waves, a type of electromagnetic radiation. Picture a radio wave in your head. Picture a cage in your head. Now, imagine that the mesh in the cage is sooooo teeny that the radio waves cannot fit through the mesh of the cage. The cell phone can't send any signals out, and it can't pick up any coming in. To summarize in more technical language: A Faraday cage will shield an object inside of it from the effects of electromagnetic radiation as long as the microscopic holes in the cage are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.
To learn more about Michael Faraday or Faraday cages, you could start with Wikipedia. To see something really cool about how Fraday cages are applied, click this link: http://www.glumbert.com/media/highpower
Would you want this guy's job?
1 comment:
Wouldn't it terrify that poor, isolated phone? Think of it-- spending all its life surrounded by the radio waves that tell it its friends and family are all out ther. It was NEVER out of touch with the world, constantly flooded with information and the locations of its companions. And then, all of a sudden, that world goes dark.
If you wrap your phone in aluminum foil and afterwards it's a shivering, neurotic mess, well, now you know why.
I was selling some hardware to a guy at MIT once, and helped him carry it up to his lab. Turns out he was doing some kind of research that required a room-sized Faraday Cage. I told him I had to make a quick call, and he pointed to this thick, copper-clad door with copper bushings around it, and said, "Well, just don't try it from in there."
It was an impressive installation-- it was basically a fairly large room covered and lined with copper sheeting inside his lab, an even larger room. There were insulated conduits to bring in power and network, but he had those blocked off. It was pretty cool.
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