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
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
So, it seems the Big Bang is about the best model we have of universe formation at the current time. So by applying other physics principles we might be able to estimate what it sounded like. True, this is in a sense unprovable, so I agree that we can't really reach step 4, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Scientists (Personally, I'm just an amateur these days) have great difficulty getting people to understand this distinction. These wackos say things like PROVE EVOLUTION OR I DECLARE IT WRONG!. The point is, you can't prove it, and any scientist will regard such things just as the best model based on some compelling evidnece, but will never put blind faith in it.
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...
Expansion of the universe is not a physical movement through space. It is a rate of change of the physical properties of space ie. space is stretching or to be more precise, light shifts more to the red as it travels now than it did fifteen billion years ago.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Standing outside the universe is not really something you can do. If indeed the universe is bounded, it's most likely not in our traditional three dimensions. Latest research indeed indicates that it just goes on and on looping around on itself (in all three directions, the bending is in higher order dimensions), so if I lift off the Earth in my rocket ship and travel in a straight line in any direction, I will eventually end up back at Earth on the opposite side (or at least where Earth happened to be when I left for my trip).
Although we have no theories about what might be "outside" the universe, it's pretty impossible to form any theories because we can't see it, we have zero evidence that anything outside the universe exists, and if we did go there, perhaps our physical laws (unique to our universe) may well have no meaning.
If there is nothingness outside the universe, it does not mean a big black void. Nothingness is not something you can stand around in. Nothingness means NOTHINGNESS, no time, no length, no height, no breadth, no nothing. It doesn't exist. Not existing is not the same as being empty, unfortunately true nothingness is not a concept our human minds can deal with because our monkey ancestors never encountered it in their day-to-day lives.
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."
Space itself streched, the matter did not move apart. Think of a ballon with dots on it, as you inflate the balloon, the dots move apart due to the stretching of the medium they are embedded in. There are no constraints that we know of on the speed that space can stretch at.
Ah! Now I understand warp drive technology. It is simply a method of partially relaxing a selected region of current space from its stretched state to a state that is more like its original condition. Hummm, it will require developing some warp field coils to contain the energy released in relaxation until it can be bled off into somebody's power grid, but that's just a SMOE (small matter of engineering).
(Now where did I put the US Patent Office address?)
any scientist will regard such things just as the best model based on some compelling evidnece, but will never put blind faith in it.
There's ample historical evidence to disprove this theory, unfortunately. Many scientists get tied to particular theories and cannot be dissuaded from them. In the face of evidence that appears to contradict their theories, they try to find ways to discredit the evidence or demonstrate through some logical sleight of hand that it does fit their theory. Or sometimes they just ignore it.
This is because scientists are people and people are imperfect. However, science as a whole is pretty effective at discarding bad theories, even if scientists aren't. It just takes a generation or two.
It's also important to remember that bad theories, once established, do not die until a theory that is clearly better comes along. Until then, the bad theory is kept, and patched to fit the evidence.
Science is a fine process for understanding the observable world, but it's a good idea to understand its limitations as well as its strengths. One must be skeptical of skepticism :-)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
X-Wing fighter pilots have never been proven to be capable of thinking.