At 11:47 PM 7/2/2012, Rich Murray wrote:
Robert V. Duncan shows a slide from SPAWAR Navy lab (Pamela Mosier-Boss) that claims a 6 kv DC electric field from plates external to a wet conducting electrolyte has effects within the electrolyte -- but the reality in simple electrostatics is the electric field exists in the two plastic walls of the cell, between the liquid and the two external plates, i.e., a simple double capacitor setup, with no field in the conductor (electrolyte) that connects the two charged capacitors.
A writer interpreted "no field in the conductor (elecrolyte)" to literally mean "no field." Here, it means "no significant voltage gradient." There will be such a gradient in any conductor with non-zero resistance and any current flowing. However, the point here is that the voltage gradient set up *by the external field* will be tiny, almost certainly undetectable, not the kilovolts per cm that was claimed in the SPAWAR paper. A field of kilovolts per cm, if maintained across a significant distance in an electrolyte such as used in the SPAWAR experiments, would result in extremely high currents, it would create a plasma.
