Sooooo the original 'Busters have to have a fan club of some kind in their world, right? Like, there have to be fanatics who idolize Peter Venkman and Egon Spengler (RIP Harold Ramis, you are missed!) the way IRL folks idolize Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr -- and sure, most of them will have reproduction fake Proton Packs like people do in our world, just like people in both have fake katanas and reproduction Halo guns and the like.

But there's NO WAY that someone, somewhere, hasn't gone completely Fullmetal Ghostbusters Dork to the point where they've arguably made the transition from Alonzo Quihana to Don Quixote de La Mancha, in Ghostbusters form. This dude is *so* obsessed that he's spent literally *years* working out how the Proton Packs function from publicly available information, even though it's supposed to be a tightly-guarded 'trade secret' or whatever, and he's secretly built his own Pack from what he can get and fabricate on his own, in his garage machine shop. He's even made his own uniform, in his own style.

His uniform doesn't look like the official ones.

His Proton Pack doesn't look like theirs.

His Pack doesn't work as efficiently as their packs do.

His Pack isn't nearly as reliable, either.

His Pack also doesn't work quite the way theirs does... he had to make a few equipment substitutions.

But, his Pack has essentially the same sort of output as the original Packs -- just, its stream is a little more energetic. Not like the 2016 Packs, though ;) 

His Pack also does use the same design principles as the original Packs, even if the machinery involved  isn't identical. It just gets to that output slightly differently.

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So, a moment to talk about how the Proton Packs supposedly work. I will preface this by saying that, in terms of actual logical, sensible scientific scholarly knowledge, as it might even remotely be said to apply here, the theoretical concepts and technology, as needed to explain the approximate functionality of a backpack form-factor device and handheld wand for generating and projecting intertwined, highly charged particle-energy streams for the purpose of temporary lasso-like containment of paranormal metaphysical apparitions is, quite predictably, summed up by the following video --

Right. Now, having gotten the real-world side of things over with, and with a bit more brevity and simplicity -- not to mention use of publicly-accessible knowledge, information, and terms -- than, say, someone such as the preeminent Lawrence M Krauss might apply here, considering his well-known approach to another science-fiction franchise...

*ahem*

...in the Ghostbusters world, ghosts carry a negative ionic charge. The Proton Packs, canonically, use a cyclotron (the drum thing with the blinky red lights) functioning as a positron collider to generate a proton stream and accelerate it to a degree. This is then fed to the wand, which presumably contains a compact linear accelerator as a second stage, although its primary purpose is to focus and direct the stream of highly-charged protons -- positive ions, basically -- in a specific direction. The interaction between the ionic charges confines the ghosts, even if they're out of phase with the rest of reality.

I think you can see why I linked the video I did, if you have even the most casual knowledge of science.

Remember those eSurance commercials from a few years ago? "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works...!"

Yeah.

But the thing is, it works in the Ghostbusters world, and that's what matters. So we'll roll with it. However, we do need to make a few practical considerations.

Firstly, that overpowered cookie tin full of Christmas lights back there is probably not actually a cyclotron.

A 37" cyclotron at the parking lots of Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley California. Photo by 'Aenonsun' on Wikimedia Commons.

That's a photo of your standard-issue cyclotron. This particular one was one of the first, but the way they function, you're not going to be rid of the fact that you need absolutely mind-bogglingly incredible magnetic fields around them to make them work.

No, really. The cyclotron proper is the bit in the middle. The drums on top and on bottom? Those are electromagnets, to generate the field, and the massive black thing that looks like a giant bit of steam piping -- it goes through the coils, by the way -- is the magnetic yoke that does the rest of that job.

Yeah. MRI machines wish they had a personality this magnetic.

While it's true that something closer to about a fourth or a fifth the size of that 37in diameter machine (the actual cyclotron, not the magnetics surrounding it!) would need far smaller magnetic machinery, you're still going to need something... a bit bigger than what fits in a backpack, to put it politely. To fit in what's depicted, the actual accelerator device would be about the size of a 12-1/2oz can of chunk chicken, maybe, and you're simply not going to get anything even suitable as a desk toy out of something that size.

There's a later technology, the synchro-cyclotron, and and even later development, the synchrotron, but the former has the same magnetics issue as the original and the fact that there's news articles from early 2008 about the latter hailing the development of one so remarkably tiny as to be about the size of a particularly large dining-room table, both are pretty-well instantly done in.

I suppose if you're at Columbia and you've got the sort of research budget that goes along with that, and you're really good with the tech of the era, you might be able to pull off a MacGuffin, but in COVID-endemic urban and suburban America in the 2010s and early 2020s...? No way in heck. Not happening!

That said, we're not done in just yet. There is a way -- the Vigilante Ghostbuster has a MacGuffin of his own. I'll get into that in the next Log, which will explain, in a nutshell, how his Proton Pack functions :)