My physics professor just told the class the wildest story from when he was in grad school about building a high voltage unauthorized Tesla coil with the ability to kill a man
No I’m still not over this - this man along with two other graduate students rigged a Tesla coil and a faraday cage without a budget and the arcs of electricity that came off of it hit things in the room like exposed gas pipes. He found a thick piece of plexiglass that he sawed into smaller pieces, he found a screwdriver that he filed down to a sharp point, and he reasoned that by charging the plexiglass with a shit ton of excess electrons and striking it with the screwdriver-ice pick immediately after flipping the coil off but before the energy in the room had a chance to dissipate, they could see the physical path of the conducted electricity as it conducted through the excess electrons.
These men rigged up an empty storage closet in their lab with the faraday cage and Tesla coil and ran their little experiment. My professor ran into the room the instant the coil was turned off, grabbed the grounded screwdriver-ice pick, and stabbed the plexiglass millimeters away from the edge where he could’ve missed.
And it worked.
This man captured a god damn lightning strike in physical media. That shape is from the electricity breaking through the structure of the plexiglass. That’s literally the conduction path.
Anyway I was talking to one of the lab instructors about it and she put her head in her hands and literally groaned. “I wish John hadn’t told you that story.”
