[maushu]

I believe the description as a "wall" is not completely correct. Yes, it's a wall as a unpassable obstacle, but the description they gave when walking into it seems more like a field "can't turn around just walk backwards". The field was just dense enough to stop people from continuing moving forward similar to molasses.

[Workaccount2]

The gripe I have though is that it is incredibly hard (if not impossible) to create a dense powerful e-field without it arcing over.

To be powerful you need an incredibly high voltage, to be dense you need the positive (holes, as they say) and negative charges to be close to each other.

If you could get 5MV between two plates that are a foot apart, that e-field would be insane an probably could do all manner of sci-fi. But it would flash over and equalize in a picosecond. Even if you had some kind of god tier power supply supply that could support a constant 5MV, you would just end up with a dense wad of plasma vaporizing everything.

[DeepSeaTortoise]

Dunno. The breakdown voltage of vacuum is enormous. There might be several unknown parameters at play here which would increase the breakdown voltage of the air.

It might be but an urban legend, but the phenomenon sounds way too fun to not look into it (or to stop spreading it should it turn out as false, kinda like Santa)

[Workaccount2]

There are floating electrostatic experiments that are pretty cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6bKDaZiy_k

[TeMPOraL]

This is the same impression I got, precisely because of this description. If it's the effect of a field, it would seem that by the point you notice it blocking your forward progress, you're already rather deep in it.

Perhaps humans feel resistance/repulsive forces non-linearly?

Makes me think of magnets, too - when you have two strong magnets oriented so they repel each other, and try to get them closer, the effect is very strongly non-linear and, unless you're intentionally pushing the magnets together with significant force, can feel like it turns on almost instantly.

[TimTheTinker]

> Perhaps humans feel resistance/repulsive forces non-linearly?

That's got to be the key here. Human perception is known to be logarithmic in so many other ways.