Spooks Gadgets

[A Cousin]

OK - with lunch break research, here is what I have found out. (Again - I am no expert! If I have anything wrong, please feel free to jump in.)

For anyone interested, here is an explanation of what a Faraday Cage is from wisegeek.com. I like this site because they keep it simple! And I like the Mad Scientist dude in the upper left corner. I bettcha he has a bow tie because bow ties are cool, so I hear.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-faraday-cage.htm

Your car is a Faraday Cage. An Airplane is a Faraday Cage. This is why you don't get shocked if lightening strikes you in either.

A building made of reinforced concrete could maybe act as a Faraday Cage. Apparently, this is why wireless networks sometimes don't work very well in hotels. When Korsakov pushes that little button of his, somehow, someway, and from some kind of external source, he is smacking the room he is in with an electromagnetic charge that creates a Faraday Cage, or an electromagnetic void, inside the room. The surveillance equipment, I am assuming, cannot transmit or receive in the void. Two things cannot be blocked by a Faraday Cage: a compass (the earth turns too slowly so the EM shift is too slow) and static (note what comes up on the monitors when Korsakov creates the cage.)

How Malcolm is getting around it and why it proves to be so difficult for him, I don't know. It definitely has something to do with that electromagnetic spike. Maybe that is why he gets so pissy? The discovery of the concept is an old (Ben Franklin first observed it in 1755, Faraday made his first cage in 1836.) and simple idea - put a positive charge with a negative charge and you get a void. I would imagine that Malcolm's idea of the worst day of his life would indeed include being stymied by a concept as fundamental as a Faraday Cage.

Updated:

Well, lookee here! I can EDIT to add on! Cooooool!

In conversation with the DH yesterday afternoon in the car (he's the real Boffin of the family), re-watching 4.8, as well further research, things have come to light in my quest to separate fact from (very cool) fiction.

- A building constructed with reinforced concrete can act as a Faraday cage but would not be able to block the range of frequencies that would needed to be blocked. The room would have to be "tricked out" with a very fine metal mesh - walls, windows, floor, ceiling, everything - and it would have to be very fine indeed. Malcolm does mention that Korsakov tricks out the room in some kind of an advanced Faraday cage.

- As to being able to turn it on and off at will, the Faraday principle being a basic law of physics, that would a difficult, if not impossible, thing to do. Korsakov would have to be controlling the magnetic fields around the room. How he would find the power source to do such a thing is questionable. I did read something that theorized that tapping into underground power sources might work, but its a theory. So the ability to do this is questionable in my mind. (Yeah, yeah, I know, its entertainment, not fact. )

- As for poor Malcolm and the "Faraday Spike" seen on his monitor when he finally does get through, I can only guess that this is in reference to a spike of very high frequency radiation like X-rays or Gamma (yikes!) rays. The higher the frequency the shorter the wavelength, the easier to get through very dense metal mesh. He would have to at least know the material and thickness of the structure and cage as well as the frequencies being blocked by the cage in order to choose the just the right frequency for the spike.