Shrunken coins

I met Bert in person, he is a fantastic individual. He lives not too far from me.

i

I don't know if it was Bert, but I met a guy at the Tesla museum in Colorado Springs back in 1993 or so who showed me a coin he had shrunk, in his opinion, by warping time/space using Tesla's blah this blah that tinfoil hat the other. I expressed my usual level of skepticism, adding that I'd like to measure the displacement and mass before I believed he'd done anything other than just annular compression. He lost interest in talking to me at that point. Not sure what his goal was; it was cool, but it's nothing to do with warping space-time there, sparky.

Interesting, but I'm going to have to see a more believable explanation than the one in the Pop Sci article to, well, believe it.

Nothing to do with time space, indeed. Shrinking coins is akin to forging, simply displaces material from one place and moves it to another.

Bert showed me how coins are shrunk, it is fascinating. He sells shrunken coins and I highly recommend his products.

i

In the photographs the coins did look "thicker" - or am I just imagining that?

No, you are not imagining, they become thicker and smaller diameter, no magic is happening. The density or volume does not change, only dimensions and shape.

i

Its simple electromagnetic induction. A truly enormous current pulse is delivered to a couple turn primary wound around the coin, and a massive current is induced within the coin. The current produces a magnetic field, and there is energy involved in buidling that field (which will also be huge, of course.) So, there is a large compressive force trying to pull that current into a smaller loop, and in the process, it drags the edge of the coin inward with it. This is where the physics starts to escape me, why the current loop can't shrink without pulling the coin with it. But, this effect is the Z-pinch, and is the key to one of the areas of inertial confinement fusion experiments. See articles about the "Z Machine"

The Z machine is just a bit bigger than the coin shrinker, I believe they were running 320,000 A at 90,000 V in some previous work. Love that picture with the arcs over the pool of water.

Jon

Yep, they sure are thicker, but they seem more so nearer the centers, sort of slightly convex on both sides.

I've got 25¢ and 50¢ US coins (one each) I bought from Bert via eBay about the same time I bought a "Snail Ball" from a shop in England:

Maybe "second childhood" is accompanied by a renewed interest in toys like that?

Jeff

The most recent advance resulted in an output X-ray power of about 290 trillion watts -- for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire world's output of electricity.

Gulp!

A very long time ago (1969?), I got a tour of Sandia Labs. They showed us the pulse X-ray machine they had at the time, along with a 1/16" thick sheet of tantalum they had blown a dime sized hole in with a beam of x-rays. It was all wrinkled & distorted around the hole with bits of splatter. Very impressive. They had a lot of other neat toys. I expect that almost 40 years of research has improved on them by quite a bit.

Doug White

Me too...

I watched a powerfull "flash X-ray" machine at a GE lab in Pennsylvania about 20 years ago. It had a large horizontal Van de Graff generator maybe 20 feet in length which chuffed away for several minutes charging up some monster capacitors until they fired the thing off. It made quite a BANG when it let go.

The place I was with was contracting with them to check the "radiation hardness" of some GPS satellite electronics I had a hand in. (But not while they were flashing it. )

Jeff

I got some peripheral involvement in shrinking coins in 1991 [ I showed up, and got them to shrink some coins for me].

The large loft in Down town Seattle used for amateur experiments was rented by two guys.

There is a wizard named Dan who suggested to those two guys to go buy some surplus capacitors that had become available.

These were special caps used for Reagan's star wars research on high velocity electric guns. The caps were high capacitance value, high Voltage, low effective series resistance, and low output inductance.

They would wind solid, not stranded wire around a coin. A safety shroud that looked like a helmet, but was ~1/4" welded steel, was put over the coil and coil.

The caps were charged up for ~10 minutes with a Neon light transformer, ~10,000 Volts.

An pneumatic compressed air solenoid had been fashioned. It was something like a wooden arrow that was pushed by air very quickly to close the circuit.

When the air valve was thrown, we would be hiding behind furniture and covering our ears. It was as loud as being indoors with a high power rifle. The solid #12 AWG wire would break up into pieces 1/4" long and fly outward making holes in most insulators. Nomex paper was the only thing I saw tough enough to stand up to the explosion.

Dan suggested an explanation for the forces: He said we had 1,000,000 peak Amps. He said that the coil was a toroidal bundle that was being forced by the magnetic force to have a smaller minor diameter and a larger greater diameter.

flux was then crowded into the coil major diameter and pushing outwards. The flux set up eddy currents in the coin, that produced flux that made more crowding. This is the force that made our Quarters shrink in diameter and get twice as thick.

Your description is 100% on target.

i