Slashdot Mirror
Big Bang Really a Big Hum
benna writes "The New Scientist reports, 'The Big Bang sounded more like a deep hum than a bang, according to an analysis of the radiation left over from the cataclysm. Physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle has created audio files of the event which can be played on a PC. "The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night," he says.' Apparently the idea for the project came from an 11 year old."
Sound doesn't travel thru space (a vacuum) right... so how can you hear the big bang?
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
I guess it just didn't know the words.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
So, tell me again how jet planes sound different in the middle of the night as opposed to, say, at 10 am?
And how do you verify what it sounded like. This seems like the jumped a few steps in the scientific method.
You have to realize there is plenty of hydrogen for the sound to travel through.
Even if sound can't travel through space due to the the sparse particles to set in motion... their should still be some particles set in motion after all they were created in pretty much the same instance as the sound itself were created...
I win. :)
This came up on the BBC Radio 4 interview with the scientist responsible, incidentally. I believe you can discover his response at the BBC website, assuming this is the interview that was broadcast this morning.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Electron clouds around nuclei do not have a color, but it is useful to visualize the charge density using colors. Electromagnetic fields do not have field vectors, but they're useful in visualizing the fields.
Visualization is a very useful tool in science. Why not use sound as another way of interpreting complex information? I was intrigued by the sound of a DNA (DNA interpreted as sound) a while ago.
So are we standing outside the universe to hear this sound, or are we in the vacuum of space?
Right.
Well becuase some of us cant afford to live anywhere else except where 18 wheelers come barrelling on through and applying jake brakes right in front of your house at 10 am. At midnight it is just cars. for rich people it is silence.!
By definition sound is pressure variations in air. Obviously when the big bang happened 15-20 billion years ago there was no air, there was nothing at all besides the expanding universe, which certainly was not made of air. The ultradense, unbelievably hot primordial soup could not have made any sound as it expanded.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
AFAIK, the density of matter approached infinity as you went back to the moment of the big bang (since the volume approached 0.) I don't know how long it lasted, but for at least awhile there would have been enough density for sound to propagate.
For great justice.
This is what, the fourth time this has been posted? Mod it down please.
I would never describe a jet plane passing over my house as a "hum".
I used to camp in an area where Air Force F-16's and A-10s would fly very low to approach a target range about 10 miles away. An F-16 sounds more like screeching, earth-shattering death at 100 feet than a "hum".
And if the afterburners are on, forget it. YUO = Temporarily deaf!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
.. most of the action was over after 10e-30 seconds
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
and besides, there was nobody there to hear it anyway
don't make me show you the sound of one hand clapping!
Duh, of course it needs oxygen. How else would it breathe, let alone hum??
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, notice I said air in the first sentance. To be fair sound doesn't even need air, but when I mentioned oxygen I was just trying to make the point that the most popular medium for most sound, oxygen (and I guess nitrigen too) didn't even exist yet at the time of the big bang.
What is amazing is that Prof. Cramer used only a 16 line Mathematica notebook to produce his simulation of the "sound of the Big Bang. This summary gives you more details on his work and his writings. You also can read his column, "BOOMERanG and the Sound of the Big Bang," It has been published in January 2001 and amended in September 2003.
Juat a WAG? (Wild Ass Guess?)
there is no way in hell you can get any data off of the actual event, all you can gather is the residual effects that are still lingering.
so this is what it's like now, 20 bajillion years later and we are trying to extroplate back to the event horizon based on a infentecimal amount of data.
great.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From the article:
From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across. At that time the sound waves were too low in frequency to be audible. To hear them, Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times.
I don't get this (but then, this isn't my cup of tea either). If the universe started out as a small dot how can it be 18 million light years wide after only 780.000 years? Did it expand at a rate greater than the speed of light? I thought that was impossible...
Please login to access my lawn
Off the point but: John Cramer is the author of one of the most intriguing interpretations of quantum mechanics. You can find the Reviews of Modern Physics reference in Carver Mead's (yes, that Carver Mead) Collective Electrodynamics, aka the book that made every ex-physicist in the Valley wish they still were...
Here, for you:
Giant sound waves propagated through the blazing hot matter that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These squeezed and stretched matter, heating the compressed regions and cooling the rarefied ones.
Even though the Universe has been expanding and cooling ever since, the sound waves have left their imprint as temperature variations on the afterglow of the big bang fireball, the so-called cosmic microwave background.
That's actually kind of cool considering that in hinduism and buddhism, the sound that universe makes is the "OM" which, when you say it, turns into a hum... creepyness
Whatever you do, don't download that soundbite! The RIAA is tracking all downloads and will SUE YOUR ASS for copyright violations!
"How do you expect me to see the forest with all these damn trees in the way?!"
How long will it take this to be sampled and appear in the charts? How much free publicity could be generated by "our latest single includes the start of the universe"?
And more to the point, how can the RIAA make more money out of it?
There was no big cluster of mass that exploded like a bomb. It is simply that space itself expanded, meaning that the shift to the red has increased for the light travelling between two disctinct points in the universe.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
No.
But in other news, God is now suing the researcher for copyright violations.
Please stop downloading this material or the RIAA will be contacted. If that doesn't work, then the world will end in with plaques and fire.
That's all.
In Yoga, the mantra "Om" (or Aum) is supposed to represent the sound the universe makes. The "vibration of life" as it were. Those old yogis were really ahead of their time! Ommmmmmmmmmm...
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Sound is what brain calls the netural signal that was picked up by a audio reciever that is listening in medium, normally air. The wave in air moves around 700 mph, in other mediums faster or slower.
1) Who was listening?
2) What was the medium at say 1 light year from "bang"?
3) Did the listener get killed because the light pulse got there first? Hence never hear the sound, so what sound?
4) Do bear use the woods as W.C.s?
The soundwaves that were found are an impression of quantum scale energy fluctuations carried to earth by cosmic microwave background radiation. Scientists were able to measure the waves by looking at cosmic microwave background (CMB). These early soundwaves are thought to have created super and giant clusters of galaxies with their travel. The soundwaves are actually contained in primordial plasma. They are effectively overtones or harmonics of the big bang explosion that is said to have created the universe.
I did a story that posted on Kuro5hin some time back about this that goes into just a touch more detail about ramifications for this sound.
Right.
OK so as 50 people have already pointed out, sound can't exist in space because sound waves are vibrations and there are no air molecules in space for a 'sound' to vibrate, but has it occured to anyone else yet that there wasn't any space for this sound to exist in either?
If the big bang was the creation of the universe (aka everything), then it happened not in empty space, but in nothing so how is it even remotely meaningful to talk about the sound of the big bang when the event itself was (at the time) all that existed - there was nothing for it to make a sound into other than itself,
so what we're really talking about isn't the sound of the big bang at all but the frequency at which it is thought to have been resonnating? which that humming sound (I'd already heard it on Radio 4 when the Today programme ran this story this morning) doesn't really illustrate very well since our ears aren't sophisticated enough to hear 90% of it.
surely it would make more sense to look at a waveform diagram of this than turning it into a funny noise...
here
There is nothing really philosophical about it. Hearing is what you do with your ears. Stating the big bang sounds like this is just crap. You can't tell what a "sound" which would let the (logarithmic) dB scale "explode" sounds like. (And remember how hypothetic all that is: there is no consent if there really was a big bang. Sure, steady state isn't too well supported among physicists, and the big bang is a great thing to talk about for those not really knowing much (I admit that I'm not too deep in the matter either).
But a physicists wants to attest a sound to a hypothetical event, happened 15 billion years ago, where there are still many unknown factors in the universe (think dominance of matter over anti-matter etc.) and far off the scale not only a human can hear but also what he can measure if he was there.
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
didn't the buddhists figure this our a few thousand years ago?
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
I wonder what the sound of the dying server will be like? A bang or a hum?
The Big Bang is named that for the activity, not the sound. AFAIK, there were no ears around to hear it anyway.
Its really more likely that a big bang would contain a much richer spectrum of vibration. But the further you are away from the source the lower it will sound, as the higher frequencies of sound don't travel as far. Examples are of hearing the rumble of a rocket or space shuttle launch from 30 miles away comparied to just a mile or two, where you hear the higher frequencies, crackeling. Or the low frequencey rumble heard in northern Asia when the indonesian volcano exploded in teh 1500s physically causing the so called dark ages (about a decade long). Or the bass from a car stereo traveling a good distance, even thru walls, but not the higher end.
Sound may not travel thru a vacume, but the question is, at what point would sound be stopped by such a vacume during the sequence of an anti-vacume explosion?
How did the universe get 18 million light years across in just 760,000 years? Seems that something would have had to travel faster than light to get far away.
There is no sound in space. Slashdot told me so. Even though they all love star wars, which has lots of sound in space.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Enjoy some truly cosmic drum 'n bass!
If a ball of incredibly dense matter explodes and forms a universe, and nobody's around to hear it, did it really explode?
If you cover your eyes and see nobody, does that mean nobody sees you? Does it mean the world doesn't exist anymore?
What exactly is the relationship between philosophy and turning bullshit into questions?
Sounds more like running my lawnmower while a plane is flying overhead. I've been making that sound for years, where's my PHD?
No one was there to listen to it, but we've proven it was a hum. Let alone, we've never proved that there was a big bang to begin with.
People will believe what they hear if they hear it over and over and over and over and over...
No, I didn't intend to troll...I won't post any replies to this post.
"Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
The sound seems to remind me of the concorder flying over my house. Every time concorde flys (or flew as it should now be) over populated areas, it had a very deafning sound, but by the time it gets to heathrow airport (or JFK in america), it does seem to sound more like this.
Spooky!
Murphy's Law of Research: Enough research will tend to support your theory.
They want to rename the start of the universe to the Big Hum? I don't see this name becoming popular.
I think thats pretty good...
--rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
In space no one can hear you bang.
, 'The Big Bang sounded more like a deep hum than a bang, according to an analysis of the radiation left over from the cataclysm.
Kinda like on pork n' beans night when dad decided to let off one of his big ol' stinky farts. This is just silly to say the least.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Can this be correct? If the universe was 760'000 years old and 18 million light years across that would mean that the matter was traveling over 10 times the speed of light. If it travelled at the speed of light surely it would only reach 760'000 light years in each direction. That doesnt add up to 18 million to me. Did i miss something?
The reason you can't hear sound in space is because it's almost a vacuum. Back around the time of the Big Bang, matter was packed much closer together and density was far higher. Much higher, for example, than the density of the Earth's atmosphere. So yes, sound vibrations could propagate around in the early universe.
All you people who keep complaining that 'You couldn't really hear a TIE Fighter like that!', or 'The Death Star couldn't really make a shockwave like that--it's in a vacuum!'--this is why.
After all, it was, "A long time ago..."
--Ribald
FYI: Sound travels very effectively (in fact faster) through water or steel also. Lots of trolling and misinformation on this thread. May as well add my own...
Sound is generally defined as a compression wave through a medium, therefore any material capable of bearing a compression wave will transmit sound.
For example, you could imagine that the waves lapping up on the beach are sound. You just have to transpose them to a pitch high enough for human ears to detect.
I haven't read the details of the article yet, but based on similar stories I have read recently, I think the author is probably describing this kind of excercise, taking a wave propogation phenomena that we would not perceive as sound (remember lots of things beside sound are wavelike, e.g. the electromagnetic spectrum) and transposing or amplifying it into the range of human audiological sense.
Do a google for Fiorella Terenzi. She has done some really neat recordings based on transposing and manipulating audio data from astronomical sources.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Kewl! Now I finally have the possibility to actually hear the Slashdot effect.
hapo
in the vacuum of space you can't hear a slashdotted server scream
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well because they didn't know the words....
Sorry it had to be done.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
noone can hear you troll.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Remember the sound of the Universe is:
Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
... not with a bang, but with a whimper
Notice that the wav file is labeled as BigBangSound_2.wav,
which means there was another sound file. I wonder what the first sound was.
Interesting. Aslan sang Narnia into existence.
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
This is just taking energy fluctuations and "resampling" and scaling into the narrow band of frequencies (approx. 20Hz-20KHz) that we perceive as sound.
You can do this with anything--I wouldn't be surprised if some site somewhere lets you "hear" the Sun's recent plasma ejection.
This is not what you would have heard if you had "been there", folks.
This kind of pseudo-science is even more useless than the "what color is the universe" articles. I guess people love to be able to relate to hard-to-comprehend things with their senses.
Nothing to see here, folks, lets just move along and go back to our arguments about whether the universe is shaped like a donut or a soccer ball.
bp
Please stop downloading this material or the RIAA will be contacted. If that doesn't work, then the world will end in with plaques and fire.
Ooh, scary plaques.
Sorry.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
I have been known to pride myself on the useless information I know, and I dont know about you guys, but this is just stupid. You gotta wonder what kinda stuff could have ben done with that computing power and money...I wonder how much further cancer treatment couldve gone...but then again it is amazing to see what kind of BS someone can come up with when avoiding real work:-D
Here's an ogg format of the sound file:
http://tools.waglo.com/bigbang.ogg
Sound: jet engines
Distance: football fields
Mass: Volkswagons (a 16" gun can shoot a volkswagon 20 miles).
Amount of data: Number of Library of Congresses.
The RIAA's lawyers are suing physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle for violating their copyright.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...but:
If a man says an opinion, and there's no women around to hear it, is he still wrong?
I stole that.
So if a universe suddenly springs into existence, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
No sig.
Ancient Indian philosophy says that the world orignated with Sound (dhvani). The basic sound being the 'Om'. Science just proved it to be right.
We can debate the validity of sound in space, but keep in mind. This is not fact, yet. Scientific Fact is achieved only when enough scientists accept a theory constituting a large enough quorum as to make any opposing view appear to be of little significance.
There doesn't have to be any 'before' since time doesn't pass without space. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if the big bang was the culmination of a previous collapse of loads of matter into a single point. God doesn't have to necessarily be in this picture.. it's hard enough to do science without religion interfering.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
"Physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington in Seattle has created audio files of the event which can be played on a PC" The next time someone is talking about back when they were a kid and had to walk 10 miles up hill to school in the snow wearing ratty old worn out shoes.
I'll just reply with something like 'O yea? well this John Cramer guy was making audio recordings back when the universe was created..'
Height: Statues of Liberty or Eiffel Towers. Note that, like the meter, these are both French.
All of this high-fallutin' physics speculation makes my very happy, in that in keeps some very intelligent individuals gainfully employed as fizzisists, and our of the engineering job market.
Life is tough. Life is even tougher when you're stupid.
"...through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across."
How is it that the universe could be 18 million light years across at a time when it's only 760,000 years old? If it's spreading in all directions at the speed of light, should it not be at most 1,520,000 light years across?
How can you hear the big bang when the server's been \.ed? ^-^
Setting aside for a second all the technical details about no sound in space, and speed of light and such, this is still an interesting concept- but not a new one at all.
One of my favorite passages in Tolkien's work is his story of the creation in The Silmarillion, where Middle Earth flows from the Music of the Ainur. As somebody else already posted, Aslan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles sang Narnia into existence. And many Eastern religions have associated sound with creation. Even in Genesis (and later on in John) the creative force was the "Word of God".
I'll leave conclusions to the reader, but it does make one think- why do so many people (and now add some physicists) associate sound with the beginning of the Universe?
...most Big Bangs start out as hummmers.
Have you noticed that as physicists gain more knowledge about the universe they always end up supporting what is written in the Bible ?
For example, Genesis 1:3 reads, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." The Bibles says right there that God make a sound which created light and caused the universe to take form. If you read between the lines, John Cramer is saying the same thing!!
How will atheists explain this away!!?!?
The journey is better then the end.
Mix in equal portions Politics, Religion and Science.
Ho hum...
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Drop that wave in an editing app and speed it up from 8kHz to 44.1kHz, and I swear it sounds exactly like a sound effect from your typical scifi flick.
Not that this clip sounds anything like an ohm. But it's a fun connection all the same.
==========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
The Buddhists were right!!
For those who may not know, the "AOM" sound that people make when they are meditating (you know, "a-ummmmmmm") is supposedly the sound the universe made when it was created.
Chalk one up for them, I suppose.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_no te_030909.html
Man, I hope that when you guys bitch against Windows and try to talk people so much towards Linux you have a more profound knowledge about what you are talking about than what you showed in this thread about this topic...
in space noone can here you scream. So, a hum you say? no, don't hear it. (yes, theoretically it's not completely vaccuum especially back then, so of course it could have been one)
So god was humming!? haha. I'm more convinced by the yoga ommmm. Face it, god's role becomes less and less relevant or necessary as we discover more about how our world works.
Remember, start off by believing the earth is not flat and the sun (and everything else) does NOT go around the earth.
so i assume then that it's now scientifically established that the big bang happened...
No, it's been scientifically accepted that the Big Bang happened. Scientists trust models that best explain experimental obeservation, and the Big Bang model has been doing pretty well.
well... what was there before it...
Time and space were created at the Big Bang, so your question doesn't make any sense. You may as well ask "What is North of the North Pole?"
and where does god come into the picture...
Anywhere you like. There are scientists who feel that the Big Bang was a divine act (i.e. "why" the Big Bang occurred is a philosophical question and believing that "God" created the universe via the Big Bang does not contradict the theory -- nor does it contradict one's faith).
Turns out the Universe just had a hummer.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The real question... did the universe make a sound during the Big Bang if life had not yet formed to hear it?
It was the result of a primordial plate of curried lentils.
The universe originated from the biggest and best "hummer" of all time!
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
"What something sounds like" is a subjective experience. There wasn't any sound of the Big Bang because there weren't any ears.
First of all, this sound is based on observations of the microwave background radiation, which didn't come into existence until 300,000 years after the big bang. You will note that the article states "when it [the universe] was just 18 million light years across" Imagine beating a drum that big, and you'll see why the pitch is so low. So the big bang may or may not have been a "bang" but 300,000 years later, the sound made was a hum.
:) Some folks seem to be trying to detect it indirectly via the microwave background.
Really, the relevant signal to listen to is the background signal of gravitational waves. These actually correspond rather directly to (faint) sound waves, since they induce mechanical disturbances as they pass through matter. By now, of course, most of these will have stretched to the dimensions of the universe, and be more or less undetectable, even in principle. Some theories predict the existence of higher frequency waves going back to the first moments of the big bang. We can look forward to detecting some higher frequency waves in the next five to ten years, from the various interferometers coming online. This is serious science, and could provide insights into not only the origins of the universe, but also supernovae, and the dynamics of black holes and neutron stars. Not to mention curiosities that may occur unheralded. Something akin to the advent of radio astronomy may be in store for us.
There's also (presumably) a neutrino background, from about one second after the big bang. This will be very hard to detect, until we build a big sister to AMANDA covering icy orb, perhaps ganymede
Physicists are entitled to a little fun now and then, anyway. It also helps to bring cosmology a little closer to the general public. It certainly isn't as if this researcher had to get a peer reviewed grant of many thousands of dollars to produce such "trivial" results: he simply did some starightforward processing on data that was already available, quite possibly in his spare time on his own computer. Oh, and I would definitely classify this as more useful/pertinent then that (admittedly a bit silly) "color of the universe stuff"!
It is not the case that "any" sound can be created, or that there is no relationship to the original, when scaling by 100,000. Many (most) relationships are preserved in this sort of operation. Indeed, a familiar example would be to speed up or slow down normal speech; it remains understandable.
Science starts with the presumption of ignorance, and then proceeds to discover what the universe can tell us about itself. Many slashdotters could take a lesson from this.
The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Harlan Ellison
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Except one would have to change a couple words. Because that's the way the world begins, not with a Bang, but with a Whimper.
Yup...
Yeah, maybe at Mach 1 Trillion. *bang*
It was neither bang nor hum. It was a more of a whoosh. Trust me. The magic conch told me.
Weight: elephants.
What did the big bang smell like?
"4 parsics, close enough to smell them!" - Checkov
"Ensign, smells do not propagate through the vacuum of space" - Spock
rather than a gib hcnurc. btw a gib hcnurc is a big crunch looking forwards whereas it is only reversed as a gnab gib.
That didn't make any sense at all did it?
but I fully agree that playing it backwards is the way forwards.
For anyone keeping score, that's what Siddhartha Gautama was teaching 2500 years ago...
Here on page 4 of a htmlized pdf
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
The University of Washington's Nuclear Physics Laboratory's web site has received so much traffic from people trying to find the sound that it is unreachable. I was about to post it and supporting material on my web site, but thought better of it since no server on which I have space can really sustain the kind of traffic at issue. I can email people the sound, the Mathematica application and the supporting data. If you can't get through on the NPL site, email me at kec@panix, and I will send them to you. (John Cramer is my dad.)
Shouldn't that read: 'A 16" gun can shoot a Volkswagon 352 football fields'?
It was either a science fiction writer or a math proff who asked his son what to call 1x10 followed by a hundred zeros, his reply was "googol" Well I just looked it up in the dictionary and the term is credited to to American Mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955) but I did read about him asking his son (he may of been younger 5-6), and his son should have credit, like the 11 year old in this post.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
Good thing we know what it sounded like... considering the fact that it came from nothing. Really scientific... really.
I'm sorry, but the RIAA won't let you listen to recordings of the big bang without buying the CD from them. If you missed the original concert, tough luck for you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
For those interested in cool quirky profs, the guy is also a decent sci-fi author. For my part, though, reading a sex scene written by a prof I see around the department for is a bit odd.
So the Universe is basically a huge vibrator. That must mean [insert pr0n star or your mom here] is God!
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Interesting article about the sound of the Big Bang, but...
The writer has some numbers that doesn't add up: "From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across."
Now, if I can calculate, after 760,000 years, the Universe would have a radi of 760,000 light years, not 9 million light years unless the expansion happened at a rate many, many, many times the speed of light (Which I honestly doubt!)
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
It's a Big Hum now until they find out it was a Big Sneeze.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
1) Anything that lasts a finite amount of time creates an infinite frequency response.
2) Anything that creates a finite frequency response lasts a finite amount of time.
3) Nothing lasts forever.
4) Everything creates an infinite frequency response (hummmm).
Ok not quite a proof as #3 is of our perception, but you get the idea. Nothing special.
So if a giant ball containing all the matter of the universe explodes, and no one is there to hear it, it does in fact make a sound. Remember that.
Must get lunch now...
Madness takes its toll. Exact change please.
i've been looking for a good logical distinction between law and theory for a while -- this gives me good fodder for arguments with my misinformed creationist friends.
If all the matter in the universe hurtles out of a sigularity, and nobody is around to hear it...
Well, you know the rest.
Well, it _is_ a valid complaint. It makes about as much sense as wondering what the big bang smelled like (um... nevermind).
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I prefer a hummer to a bang anyway.
...www.npl.washington.edu made when we all hit it. It took quite a while for it to finally return a little html page replacing the .wav, telling where to get the actual file.
Scientists have discovered that moments before the "big hum" there was a brief mysterious reverberating sound that due to the wonders of modern technology can now be simulated.
The Big Bang was a Troll against catholic physicits pushing a scientifically viable theory to creationism: the primordial egg was proposed by a gesuit priest. Try reading E. J. Lerner's "The big bang never happened", it's a wonderful book and gives pretty sensible explanations to cosmological data; shame that no scientific institution wants to question the enstablishment... perhaps those that run the business built their careers on these theories?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I fhte universe is created, and there's no one to hear it,
does it make sound?
I don't belive in the big bang, but it seems strange to me that they think it had any "sound" at all if, according to that theroy, there was no air to carry it.
I didn't do it! Unless I was supposed to do it. . . (hmm. .
Actually it should've been, "A 1/225-football-field gun can shoot a Volkswagon 352 football fields" since we're being pedantic.
"Well, there goes the neighborhood..."
-11-year-old boy
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
It was probably an 11 year old that came up with the big bang theory in the first place!
Besides breaking fundamental laws of physics, the big bang can't be proven in a lab setting or any setting for that matter. Fah.
On the other hand "the sound something makes" is a different kettle of fish.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
It is interesting how the basis of macro evolution rests on a big bang, and now a big hum... both are sounds... In conjunction with the "Theory of Everything" (aka the Strings Theory) it seems like evolution itself may be an attempt at filling what was never a missing link. Am I the only one who thinks that evolution is merely an explination for the unexplainable? The fact that the hum itself could have originated reality period... that there was no macro evolution needed, merely micro. What everyone should really be thinking about is: Who hummed? everything else is documented history... people really need to remove thier blinders and acknoledge God for who he is and what role he played, and still plays. Science is the study of what God made, not the method needed to discredit him.
-Digital Extremist
Has anyone measured the movement, or are we counting on red-shift alone? There could be other explanations for a red shift, such as a flat tax or something which would reduce the energy in direct proportion to distance travelled. I've heard talk of cosmic respiration, but not seen any scientific treatment of the topic.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Check out the Transactional Interpetation of Quantum Mechanics. Critiques of all the well known interpretations (CI, MWI) and others you may not have heard of.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
...would it make a sound, and would anyone exist to hear it?
The question I'm trying to answer is:
What did the big bang *feel* like?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
If a universe explodes in the universe and no one is there to hear it, does it make a bang?
Because it didn't have the worlds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a
public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
(ripped off from http://www.the-funneled-web.com/hawking.htm)
Carthago delenda est!
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Anyone else think of the THX sound before anything else?
Your brain is not a computer.
The problem with this is that as the report says 'Giant sound waves propagated through the blazing hot matter that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang.' This means that the sound waves could have tried to 'escape' the infinitely curved universe and got reflected back. Now if most people remember their wave physics then when the raised part of a wave meets another raised part of a wave then it creates a bigger raised part of the wave. Similary so for the bottom parts of the wave. But when a raised part meets a bottom part the effect cancels itself out.
This recording of a deep hum sounding like 'a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night' is the probable reason for this sound i.e. the loud part is two raised parts of the wave, the bit where it sounds as though the 'plane' sound 'is directly over the house' is where a raised bit and a bottom bit meet and the last bit is were two bottom bits meet.
Yeah, I'd accept a little degradation of the gene pool of our species if that means you FUCKIN' KILL YOURSELF.
Today's the Day of the Dead, so it'd be the perfect moment to knock yourself out. This page is about evaluating some suicide techniques, hope it'll help you out. If you need some more pointers, I suggest searching for "suicide" videos on Kazaa.
But remember that the wave will be attenuated with each reflection, so this will only work for fairly low multiples of reflection.
I don't give a flying fuck.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'll go sharpen my knives. Your family's waiting, after all.
FUCK OFF AND DIE !!!!!!
You showed him !
Anyway, you must know by now that Tyreth is nothing but a troll. His clever flaming and trolling accomplishments are dearly appreciated among the Slashdot trolling community, and he has been given a Trollback award for the month of October for this flamebait.
Here's a poor sucker deserving to be on your Foes list today !
Your trolling era is over, and the word is spreading ! Look at this nice First Post on a desktop Linux story denouncing your pathetic behavior !
You just don't seem to understand how far I'm going to go to get you out of here, you fundamentalist son of a bitch ! Your Freaks list is growing everyday, and moderators are finally starting to see your posts as what they are : pure rubbish !
DIE TYRETH, DIE !
You have lost.
Have a nice day !