Michael Faraday Defeats Cell Phones From Beyond the Grave – and more!

The theme is aluminum foil. Aluminum is a conductor! Foil is easy to shape!

To my mind, it’s pretty obvious what to do next: Faraday cages! Faraday cages are basically conductive boxes that shield whatever is inside it from electromagnetic radiation – basically, since EM radiation is just changing electric and magnetic fields, and these fields push electrons around, the electrons in a conductor naturally settle in a configuration where the net force (and thus the fields) is zero. Then, inside the box, there is no field. My first encounter with Faraday cages was in high school robotics, when we accidentally put our electronics board inside one, making it impossible for us to communicate with the robot! We fixed that up right quick…

I made a Faraday cage to shield my phone from the carrier signal. Faraday cages are very good at blocking DC fields – ones that don’t change. But cell phone signals (and, really, signals in general, such as mind-control ones) are AC – they change. If the conductor is too thin, the signal will be able to penetrate the cage. The skin depth is the thickness at which the signal drops to about 1/3 its original strength; it goes up with the resistivity of the material and down with the frequency of the signal. Since I’m using aluminum (low resistivity) and a cell phone (~100kHz frequency), the skin depth is very low – if you do the math all the way out it’s about .06 millimeters, or about 3 mils. I figured I should get at least 3x the skin depth (so that the signal goes to 1/27 of its original strength) – so about 0.2 millimeters. This turned out to be 12 layers of the aluminum foil we have at the Learning Studio; aluminum foil is surprisingly thin!

My beat-up phone gets 5 bars of signal in the Learning Studio.

I made a little pocket for my phone, and put it in.

I didn’t close off the pocket at first; even like that I was able to see that my signal had gone down from 5 bars to 1 bar. I took my phone out of the aluminum foil and texted it from Google Voice – within seconds, my phone buzzed. “Ooh, a text!”

I then put my phone in the aluminum foil, closed it up real good, and texted it again.

Minutes passed with no activity. I gave in and took the phone out of the foil. The signal had completely gone away – the indicator said “Searching…” After a few seconds, I connected to the T-Mobile network and got another text: “faraday is a chump”.

You win, Faraday. Our advanced cell phone technology is no match for your discoveries about electromagnetism.

So does this mean that tin-foil hats would actually stop you from being mind-controlled by the government? Not really. I made a cell-phone-sized tinfoil hat with the aluminum foil, and the signal only went from 5 bars to 4 bars.

It simply does not cover enough area, even though I simulated a full-face motorcycle helmet. I guess we all have to resign ourselves to being government slaves forever…