Paul Burridge wrote in message . ..
The question seems daft, but bear with me, gentlemen. Has anyone ever
had an electric shock that they feel lucky to have survived?

p.

When I was 14 I used to open an old tube TV,
then I put one hand on the high-voltage tube
that goes to the anode of the TV screen.
There are a few thousand volts here, and I
remember perfectly the two inches spark that went
to my hand before I actually touch the tube.

Fortunately the power is low, and the maximal current
shoud be roughly one mA, or else I wouldn't write it now !

I've survived a few nasty ones, one that caused me to rip half the flesh of
one finger to get loose, when some idiot electrician had reversed live and
neutral in a audio/video studio installation that I was working on.
Obviously none were fatal......

Lukas

The question seems daft, but bear with me, gentlemen. Has anyone ever
had an electric shock that they feel lucky to have survived?

I've survived a few nasty ones, one that caused me to rip half the flesh of
one finger to get loose, when some idiot electrician had reversed live and
neutral in a audio/video studio installation that I was working on.
Obviously none were fatal......

Lukas

The question seems daft, but bear with me, gentlemen. Has anyone ever
had an electric shock that they feel lucky to have survived?

Paul Burridge wrote:
On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 03:29:47 GMT, Eric Immel
wrote:


Paul, are you asking if anyone has been killed, then revived?


That's pretty close to what I'm getting at. What I *am* actually get
at is that theoretical physicists are coming around to the rather
extraordinary view that one cannot from one's own perspective be
killed by any sudden and dramatic life event. No matter how bad the
shock, you will always 'come around' to find that you've survived. The
tricky bit is that you'll probably have found yourself in a different
reality to the one you left. In the one you've left, observers will
see your cold, dead, smoking body lying sparko on the ground. Your
relatives will grieve, your obituary will be written. But *you* won't
know anything of that. You'll just believe you've had a lucky escape;
you'll go home and tell your friends and family all about it and years
later maybe you'll tell others via the Internet. Sounds nuts?
Incredible as it may seem, the majority of physicists currently
working in this field now believe this to be the case! And we're
talking world-class theoreticians here, not just the kooks who post to
alt.sci.theories.

For further info, try Googling for the following:
Many Worlds theory
Max Tegel
Quantum suicide experiment
Quantum Theory of Imortality
David Deutsche
Schroedinger's Cat
--

"I believe history will be kind to me, since I intend
to write it." - Winston Churchill

Does this mean that I died on the operating table during my
open heart surgery last year, and awoke in a different reality
where I am still living?

Paul Burridge wrote:
On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 03:29:47 GMT, Eric Immel
wrote:


Paul, are you asking if anyone has been killed, then revived?


That's pretty close to what I'm getting at. What I *am* actually get
at is that theoretical physicists are coming around to the rather
extraordinary view that one cannot from one's own perspective be
killed by any sudden and dramatic life event. No matter how bad the
shock, you will always 'come around' to find that you've survived. The
tricky bit is that you'll probably have found yourself in a different
reality to the one you left. In the one you've left, observers will
see your cold, dead, smoking body lying sparko on the ground. Your
relatives will grieve, your obituary will be written. But *you* won't
know anything of that. You'll just believe you've had a lucky escape;
you'll go home and tell your friends and family all about it and years
later maybe you'll tell others via the Internet. Sounds nuts?
Incredible as it may seem, the majority of physicists currently
working in this field now believe this to be the case! And we're
talking world-class theoreticians here, not just the kooks who post to
alt.sci.theories.

For further info, try Googling for the following:
Many Worlds theory
Max Tegel
Quantum suicide experiment
Quantum Theory of Imortality
David Deutsche
Schroedinger's Cat
--

"I believe history will be kind to me, since I intend
to write it." - Winston Churchill

Does this mean that I died on the operating table during my
open heart surgery last year, and awoke in a different reality
where I am still living?

In article , scharkalvin wrote:
Malcolm Reeves wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 Roy Lewallen wrote:

I've also read that Edison created and promoted the electric
chair, which was run from AC, to dramatize the danger of AC over DC. He
had a big investment in DC distribution systems and equipment, while
Westinghouse was promoting AC power distribution.

Didn't Edison try to get execution by electric chair "Westinghousing"
too, or is that a rumour.

Early electric chairs WERE AC, but they tended to fry you rather than
electrocute.

Electric chairs, early and semi-modern and modern, use/used AC because
AC electrocutes more than DC does (at least if the AC frequency is in the
power-line, lower-audio or upper-"subsonic" frequency range). (AC
frequencies of radio frequencies or high audio frequencies were safer.)

This business of electric chairs frying rather than electrocuting has a
grain of truth - electric chairs often have enough voltage and current to
cook vital organs in case "more-true electrocution" does not occur.

Electrocution in a typical case is most likely with AC (secondarily
pulsating DC) of power line or lower-audio or nearly-audio-subaudio
frequency and with shock path involving the head or a limb so as to
involve the brain or the heart or both. Worst case usually involves
ventricular fibrillation, a deadly disturbance in heart rhythm where
electrical cause is "typically" 100-1,000 mA of low frequency AC or
pulsating DC through the torso.
Electrocution is unreliable enough that electric chairs require
"backup" mechanisms of killing. As in either cooking vital organs or
paralyzing breating long enough to deprive the brain of oxygen long enough
to disable restarting of breathing when the shock is stopped. I insist
that survival of shocks that are not far from bad-case is equally
unreliable!

Tesla used to demonstrate passing a million volts through his body to
light gas tubes, but he used high frequency current (in the khz range) to
do it.

Tesla-related AC survival involved high frequencies that are not as bad
as either lower frequency AC or unsteady DC! High enough frequency AC is
less-electrocuting than DC can be given even slowest accidental
application/removal rates!
Horror stories by horrifically-burned high-voltage-DC survivors come
mainly from those who lived to tell a horrific tale rather than had a
closed-casket funeral because the current was DC rather than
power-line-frequency AC.

- Don Klipstein )

In article , scharkalvin wrote:
Malcolm Reeves wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 Roy Lewallen wrote:

I've also read that Edison created and promoted the electric
chair, which was run from AC, to dramatize the danger of AC over DC. He
had a big investment in DC distribution systems and equipment, while
Westinghouse was promoting AC power distribution.

Didn't Edison try to get execution by electric chair "Westinghousing"
too, or is that a rumour.

Early electric chairs WERE AC, but they tended to fry you rather than
electrocute.

Electric chairs, early and semi-modern and modern, use/used AC because
AC electrocutes more than DC does (at least if the AC frequency is in the
power-line, lower-audio or upper-"subsonic" frequency range). (AC
frequencies of radio frequencies or high audio frequencies were safer.)

This business of electric chairs frying rather than electrocuting has a
grain of truth - electric chairs often have enough voltage and current to
cook vital organs in case "more-true electrocution" does not occur.

Electrocution in a typical case is most likely with AC (secondarily
pulsating DC) of power line or lower-audio or nearly-audio-subaudio
frequency and with shock path involving the head or a limb so as to
involve the brain or the heart or both. Worst case usually involves
ventricular fibrillation, a deadly disturbance in heart rhythm where
electrical cause is "typically" 100-1,000 mA of low frequency AC or
pulsating DC through the torso.
Electrocution is unreliable enough that electric chairs require
"backup" mechanisms of killing. As in either cooking vital organs or
paralyzing breating long enough to deprive the brain of oxygen long enough
to disable restarting of breathing when the shock is stopped. I insist
that survival of shocks that are not far from bad-case is equally
unreliable!

Tesla used to demonstrate passing a million volts through his body to
light gas tubes, but he used high frequency current (in the khz range) to
do it.

Tesla-related AC survival involved high frequencies that are not as bad
as either lower frequency AC or unsteady DC! High enough frequency AC is
less-electrocuting than DC can be given even slowest accidental
application/removal rates!
Horror stories by horrifically-burned high-voltage-DC survivors come
mainly from those who lived to tell a horrific tale rather than had a
closed-casket funeral because the current was DC rather than
power-line-frequency AC.

- Don Klipstein )

Oh ok, that's where that annoying hair came from. Chick's don't seem
to like it. :-)

Oh ok, that's where that annoying hair came from. Chick's don't seem
to like it. :-)

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 20:57:23 -0400, scharkalvin
wrote:

Does this mean that I died on the operating table during my
open heart surgery last year, and awoke in a different reality
where I am still living?

Did the surgeons tell you they'd lost you for a while there? If so,
you might have been revived in that same reality in the usual way, or
else if such efforts failed, you'd then 'come round' in one of the
other remaining universes in which you didn't die, in an example the
so-called 'weak anthropic principle.'
--

"I believe history will be kind to me, since I intend
to write it." - Winston Churchill