What is a Faraday Cage used for? How to Absorb Bad Vibes

What is a Faraday Cage used for, in today’s world? An invention that is quite old, but still has a place. Indeed, a new revival of Faraday cages is upon us, as we have many more reasons today to use them than 150 years ago. Faraday cages absorb electromagnetic radiation. Quite a few spaces in society are now inundated with radiation, from phones, wifi, cell towers, IoT, and even induced fields from appliances.

What is a Faraday cage?

A faraday cage is simply 2 nested cages, connected together. The material the cage is made out of is highly conductive, preferably a noble metal. Conductive material, like copper, silver, and gold, easily let electric currents pass through. Whatever electric current is flowing through one of the nested cages, will flow through the other cage as well, because they are connected. In fact, the “charge” induced by these flowing electrons will live in the SURFACE of the metal it’s comprised of (Guass’s Law).

Faraday cages can also protect against lightning by absorbing the bolt. A car with a hard top behaves like a faraday cage in some respects. However, any electromagnetic radiation inside the car will tend to rattle around, having no inner cage, and thus have a hard time exiting (through windows), so this often multiplies the effects of EM inside a car.

How does it work?

A faraday cage works by trapping the electromagnetic radiation on the surface of the material of the cage itself (often wire). This way, the actual objects and space inside the cage are not affected by the electromagnetic fields.

Faraday cages can only mitigate the EM radiation. In theory, it can absorb it ALL, but in practice, we can only get closer and closer to this ideal. Using better quality metals, and a finer mesh, can increase the effectiveness. Faraday cages work best when connected to the ground. Though electrons can absorb a lot of energy for their size, it’s safer to release this energy to an ever-accepting ground than hold onto it. Otherwise, the energy can discharge onto anything relatively conductive that touches the cage, like human skin. That could be potentially dangerous. So it’s always best to ground the cages by simply dropping a wire to the earth (or grounded socket).

So a high efficiency faraday cage will use a fine mesh noble metal AND be connected to ground. There are plenty of other features one can engineer to make the faraday cage best at absorbing certain frequency bands of EM radiation as well, for example, if the purpose is to mitigate Wifi.

What is a Faraday Cage used for?

Faraday cages can be used to mitigate any situation when electromagnetic radiation is not preferable. It can also block data riding in the air on cell and wifi bands. Faraday cages are prevalent in the professions of spies, intelligence, and surveillance, for as long as we started transmitting information using electromagnetic radiation, i.e microwaves, radar, and early phones as well. Now you can use it to keep wifi and cell signals in or out of an area, mitigating wiretaps.

In many contexts a faraday cage is used when instruments need to limit electromagnetic interference. For example, hospitals use faraday cages when they do magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs). This ensures the reading is accurate and not picking up stray EM signal. Ordinary microwave ovens have a faraday cage to prevent the microwaves from traveling outside the box as much. This is what that metal mesh on the inside of a microwave is. If you put your phone inside a microwave, you won’t be able to call it. (Try it out.)

In and of itself, electromagnetic radiation is not necessarily harmful, EMPs aside (which, yes Faraday cages do work for, if robust enough). However there is quite a body of evidence suggesting the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation from phones, wifi, and even power lines can be less than desirable for the human body. (See this bibliography.) You may not be able to put your body in a faraday cage, but here at Abnormal Ways we will discuss ways to use shungite to mitigate these fields.