Mon 8 Oct 2012
Thunder and Lightning Very Very Frightening…
Posted by anaglyph under Hmmm..., In The News, Science, Skeptical Thinking
[15] Comments
While we’re on the subject of people misunderstanding science, the Guardian reports that American illusionist and ‘endurance artist’ David Blaine is in the middle of a stunt that has him standing for 3 days and 3 nights on a platform inside a 1 million volt electrical field generated by a Tesla coil.
‘I have a chance of surviving,’ said Blaine in a previous Guardian interview, an observation which, if you know anything about the science involved, is something of an understatement. Yes, he does have a ‘chance of surviving’ – pretty close to 100% chance, in fact, as long as he remains inside the metal suit he’s wearing, which creates for him a perfect Faraday Cage.
The vox pops from the Guardian video once again demonstrate the utter lack of science education in the general public. Says one overly impressed bystander:
They say it’s a million volts? Nobody could take that. Nobody could take more than 300 volts! People gonna die right away. Seriously.
No, seriously Mr Punter, you should brush up on your basic physics. You’re at greater risk of being mugged in the audience than David Blaine is from being electrocuted.
Really, the most impressive stunt being performed here is Blaine attempting to stay awake for 72 hours. That’s not easy. But even if he does fall asleep, he is protected from physical falling by a safety harness, so the biggest damage he’s ever likely to experience is to his reputation.
Tetherd Cow Risk Assessment: you could let your granny do it. It’s at least as safe as letting her pour whisky over her chest.
UPDATE: Here’s a REAL daredevil, doing something actually impressive with high voltage (as part of his job, no less).
Suck on that David Blaine.
Yes, not nodding off gets very difficult after about 18 hours (or a couple of glasses of Chardonnay!), but I’d have thought the really tough aspect would be bladder control.
Didn’t these sillies learn about Faraday at school?
I imagine the suit has some kind of tubing to deal with the bladder problem. Let’s just hope that for Mr Blaine’s sake it doesn’t accidentally short to earth somewhere.
What if he dribbles?
As long as he keeps the dribble inside the suit, he’ll be fine.
As they repeatedly told us in me Elec Eng degree: “It’s the Amps that kill (the Volts just help)”
And in a metal suit, yeah: zero Amps.
To be fair, though, magicians are all about theatre, not about risk-taking. I understand that Penn regularly fires a real bullet at Teller (they explained the trick in detail online), but neither Teller nor the stagehands are taking a significant risk.
Seems Blaine’s realized that the media potential of doing something *for a long time, in public* is much greater than for just doing it briefly, even if the achievement is basically the same.
With endurance stuff, you get constant coverage for days, instead of a one-off review of your show.
Shame that “enduring crap news coverage of annoying twats” is not, in itself, newsworthy. I guess because the endurance record for that feat currently stands at one lifetime, and is unlikely to get much longer :(
Hahaha. Good last point.
As you say, it’s rare that a stage magician is undertaking any real level of risk, although that is not always the case – in the past some stunts, such as Houdini’s escape from a milk churn underwater, were relatively high risk.
I’m not really taking Blaine’s entertainment credentials to task here, but really just bemoaning the fact that people are so uneducated that they have no idea of the science involved. Spectacle is all well and good, but with something like the Penn & Teller bullet stunt you’re getting spectacle AND cleverness.
And if we all paid attention to the science teachers at school the magicians would have to come up with some pretty spectacular new stuff.
That is an AWESOME point.
yeah – get him to do this stunt with latex bodypaint made conductive by being mixed with gold dust, and we’ll be impressed! :D
MUCH more impressed.