Can Faraday cages tame Wi-Fi?
Say you wanted to protect your Wi-Fi network from surrounding buildings. The most obvious way to do this would be to secure the devices on your network using the wireless security protocol of choice. A very effective, but more extreme, way to do this would be to secure the building itself by making it act as a Faraday cage, shielding the radio frequency waves used by Wi-Fi. Making a large building into a Faraday cage involves encasing the building in a thin layer of conductive material or metal mesh. In physics, a Faraday cage or Faraday shield - named for the British physicist Michael Faraday, who discovered the phenomenon in the 19th century and built the first iteration in 1836 - is an ingenious application of Gauss' law.
Gauss' Law establishes the relation between electric flux flowing out of a closed surface and the electrical charge enclosed inside the surface. Basically, in a hollow object that can conduct electricity, such as an aluminum sphere, charge will (ideally) distribute itself evenly over the surface of the sphere, and there won't be an electric field inside the sphere. This has the effect of blocking EMFs (elecromagnetic fields) and shielding radio frequency waves.
