28 years ago, a palace maid appeared on the Forbidden City wall. Is it true that experts used the phenomenon of iron tetroxide to explain it?

According to relevant media records, the incident happened one afternoon in 1992. At that time, there were many tourists in the Forbidden City, but the weather was not good. There were dark clouds in the sky, and there was a rain that was about to rain at any time. With the heavy rain, everyone felt that the travel plan was going to be ruined.

While everyone was complaining, someone suddenly saw several maids walking by the wall of the palace, talking as they passed. At that time, someone shouted "It's haunted", and then everyone looked around. Due to the special weather conditions at that time, and there was thunder in the sky, the atmosphere was indeed a bit scary, so some people followed up and said "It's haunted". As a result, many tourists began to scatter and flee to the surrounding areas. One brave person turned around and took a photo, which was also reproduced by major media.

After the incident, various folk "half-immortal associations" in the country began to provide answers. One of the most widely circulated theories is that the palace has been built for hundreds of years, and many people died unjustly in it. There are many maids and eunuchs among them, so the palace is a very gloomy place. When it happens to rain and thunder, the yang energy between heaven and earth is relatively weak and the yin energy is relatively heavy, so some ghosts of dead palace maids come out and walk around.

In order to curb the spread of false superstitions, experts gave a scientific explanation in an emergency: everything was actually a phenomenon of video recording and screening.

Experts said that the walls in the palace are painted dark reddish brown, and the main material is iron tetraoxide. Friends who have studied chemistry should know that ferric ions are reddish brown, and iron tetroxide is One of the characteristics of iron oxide is that it is magnetic. In the 20th century, when people made some recording tools, they used magnetic materials, such as magnetic tapes and disks. Some information is recorded on the disk through certain physical and chemical changes, and the tape or disk can reproduce the information under specific conditions.

So the expert’s explanation is that many years ago, several palace maids happened to pass by this wall during a thunderstorm. Under the action of lightning, the iron tetroxide on the wall recorded the image of the palace lady passing by. When thunderstorms occur again, ferric oxide will show the recorded moments through "projection" under specific scenes.

Since ordinary people had relatively little scientific knowledge at that time, such an answer from experts became the standard answer.

In fact, magnetic materials in nature record moments in history. This statement is not originated by Chinese experts, but is quoted from American physicist Harold Caffey and his daughter Fondalee Caffey. The scientific point made by the two men.

However, at that time, the two people only proposed such a concept and found no effective evidence or experimental records to support such a statement. So a few years later, some people speculated that the answer given by the mother and daughter was actually a kind of pseudoscience.

If we look at it from the current perspective, the palace maid incident that the Forbidden City saw back then was probably an oolong or a fake incident.

First of all, even if ferric oxide can be used as a tape to record such a moment, in order to form a flowing picture, it must constantly jump frames, which means that there must be many frames that gradually change. photos, and they are combined.

Furthermore, even if ideal electromagnetic effects can be formed during lightning and corresponding information is recorded, what is recorded should only be a photo, not a video. Even if they can record a series of photos, it is completely impossible to form a smooth video.

Although we usually do not skip frames when watching movies, this is because all movie pictures are scientifically calculated and adjusted many times to achieve an ideal picture, and are recorded by magnetic materials. The sound is only the sound card at a certain moment, not a series of sounds from beginning to end.

The most important point is that the content of ferric oxide on the walls of the Forbidden City is very small. The walls of the Forbidden City are indeed gray-brown, but the paint used by the craftsmen of the Forbidden City at that time was not all ferric oxide. Some of them are made of iron powder, but after testing, some of them are also made of other substances? Perhaps the original paint used by Zhu Di when he repaired the Forbidden City was indeed iron tetroxide, but the Qing Dynasty passed it again If you touch up the paint many times, the ingredients used may not necessarily be ferric oxide.

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, as China entered an era of successive wars, the protection of the Forbidden City was not in place, and many of the walls fell off. Since the protection of cultural relics after the founding of the People's Republic of China was not very good, some modern paints were used to repair the wall paint of the Forbidden City, so the content of ferrous oxide is almost negligible.

Therefore, it is possible that this incident was just an anomaly or someone deliberately hyped it up to increase the mystery of the Forbidden City and attract more tourists. Because the so-called photo taken by a tourist with a camera has been deleted, and all official media reports on this matter have been deleted.

If this is a real incident, regardless of whether a correct scientific answer can be found, there must still be records in this regard.

Reports at that time claimed that many tourists were so frightened that they fled in a hurry. However, some people tried to search for tourists related to this incident across the country, but they could not find the person involved. Logically speaking, for such a well-known incident to be witnessed by a large audience, it should be very simple to find the person involved.

The most important point is that the photo taken by the tourists at that time cannot withstand scrutiny, because there were no digital cameras at that time, and all traditional optical cameras were used. One of the prerequisites for an optical camera to take pictures is that the light is sufficient so that the portrait can be taken clearer.

If there were lightning, thunder, and dark clouds at that time, then the lighting conditions would definitely not be good, so it would be impossible for the optical camera to take the picture so clearly. But almost all the faces of the palace maids that were published in newspapers could be clearly seen, so the photo did not look like a snapshot.

Besides, if the Forbidden City's ferroferrite really projected an image, the camera would have captured a flashing moment, and it would be impossible to capture the photo so clearly.