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.
Scotch tape produces X-Rays, so something like this feels similarly plausible:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/10/23/217918/x-rays-ma...
(Even if that feeling is misplaced and uninformed)
> 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.
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.
But if its a wall and you touch it - you should become part of it and thus be unable to leave it ?
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.