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Haunted Houses Explained: Infrasound
anagama writes "For anyone who cringes whenever accosted by topics such as psychics, haunted houses, or any sort of new age drivel; for anyone who thinks James Randi is cool or has an active subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer - you're gonna love this story about infrasound. Here's a quote: "British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces a range of bizarre effects in people including anxiety, extreme sorrow and chills -- supporting popular suggestions of a link between infrasound and strange sensations. ... Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost -- our findings support these ideas.""
"Infrasound is also produced by storms, seasonal winds and weather patterns and some types of earthquakes. Animals such as elephants also use infrasound to communicate over long distances or as weapons to repel foes."
So now we just have to explain how the elephants got into the haunted houses. Or how it is we don't see ghosts every time there's a thundershower.
Seriously, trying to come up with a physical explaination of ghost stories that doesn't include the mind of the person is dumb. The range of reported phenomina is so wide as to be clearly "made up".
Furthemore, it strikes me, that just 22% of the people involved felt the differnce according to the article. This is not that much, meaning that majority of people don't seem to react to infrasound at all.
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
And how does that stack against the percentage experiencing paranormal phenomena?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Which is even more of a leap than the original story, considering that (A) "religious feelings" are not confined to churches, and (B) many (most?) churches don't have pipe organs.. and quite a few don't use instruments of any kind.
Again, whatever...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about a "DC coupled amp" but bass speakers go all the way down to DC (0Hz). There's certainly no practical or theoretical problems reproducing sub-20Hz signals from a bass speaker. Even your tiny 6" mid-range drivers can (and do) reproduce 1Hz signals. You just can't hear it because so little air is being moved.
The actual problem is that the lower the frequency, the more air you need to move in order to hear it. The amount of air a driver can move is partially determined by the Vd figure (volume of air moved). This is simply Sd (surface area of cone) multiplied by Xmax (cone excursion). The 1Hz signal out of your 6" drivers is so quiet that you can't hear it, but it's there. Not enough air is being moved for your ears (which are heavily tuned to 2-4kHz) to detect.
So the trick is to make the excursion large, the surface area large, thereby getting a large value for Vd. Of course, you now need a lot of power to move that much air around. That's why subwoofers have 18" cones with 1/2" excursions driven by 400W amplifiers. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.
Of course, super-low frequency generators don't bother with all this nonsense. They just use huge pistons behind a suitably long tube. Much easier to move the required amount of air.
Scientists - 1,000,001
I can't prove something doesn't exist, but you should be able to prove something does exist.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Attempting to find parsimonious answers to various questions is not a wholesale dismissal of anything. Consider that it may be you who are close-minded, unwilling to accept the possibility that what you want to believe may not be the truth.
This sort of closed-mindedness led to 'experts' being sure it was safe to turn cows into cannibals [..] The same cynical BS is responsible for hundreds of thousands of birth defects.
I'm encouraged by your skepticism toward what you call "materialism". Now, all you need to do is apply the same skepticism to what you call "new age thinking" and you're on the right path! Some further thoughts:
Honestly, since when did the subjects of ghosts and haunted houses suddenly become "new age drivel?" I grew up in a small Southern town where every family has at least two dozen ghost stories to tell with some going back two hundred years. While I realize that many "psychics" jump on the ghost bandwagon, please don't confuse their profession with the subjects they cover. Ghost stories are as similar to a new age concept as napalm is a food for deer.
Or as I have often put it, science is a religion.
Oh, come one. Science is nothing like religion. The only people who claim so are those who do not understand science. Saying science is a religion is equivalent to saying dog grooming is a religion. Science is a process - a method of filtering out truths from nonsense. There is no "belief" about this process, no deep-rooted truths about the universe inherent in testing a hypothesis.
Maybe science is too hard for you. Not hard in the sense that the rigors of science -- the mathematics, the formulas, the process of experimentation are difficult -- but maybe the cold reality of the pure, beautiful process scares you. What if that's all there is?
Now I've had close friends die from suicides and murder and pointless accidents and late at night I've conversed with Him or Her or Them or whatever could comfort me then, but this is completely different from science.
I find it interesting that we look at the correspondence between infrasound and "spooky feelings," apply Occam's razor in the way we see fit, and conclude that this is a simple cause-and-effect. We overlook the lack of any explanation for /why/ humans might even be able to process this information. Personally, I would attribute any evolved correspondence to the dangers inherent from approaching thunderstorms and stampeding elephants, but who knows? I'd like to see some MRIs done that try to look at the neural circuitry and how it's behaving.
The ancient mystics would have used Occam's razor to conclude the simplest explanation: some ambiguous external force. In other words, in ancient culture, Occam's razor would really have meant we were invoking spirits, because we can use "spirits" as an extremely simple mystical explanation for everyday phenomena.
In our modern skepticism, the "obvious" conclusion is, interestingly, different from the "obvious" conclusion another culture might draw.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive