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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."
I guess it just didn't know the words.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The entirety of all matter constituting the eventual univers hardly qualifies as a vacuum when highly concentrated.
lysergically yours
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.
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.
Living on final for an international airport, I can answer this.
In the middle of the night, its more annoying.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
You mean that the unvierse has _stuff_ in it? no, no, no... At the big bang it was all empty space on the backs of turtles. Below the turtles were more turtles. Eventually the unverse cooled down and expanded enough that the turtles got sucked in. The process of turtles falling into the universe caused matter to be created.
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.
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.
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.
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
Close but sound is a compression wave through some medium. It does not have to be air. It could be air as we commonly experience. It also could be water, iron, or any other element on the periodic table. in other words it is the compression and expansion of matter that is what we experience as sound.
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.
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...
But the early universe at the moments they're talking about was crammed into a space less than a quarter the size of a proton. Any vibrations in the primordial soup would have to have a wavelength even smaller than this, and hence a frequency whose value in Hertz would boggle the mind. If it had a wavelength bigger than the size of the universe at the time, then the "sound wave" would destructively interfere with itself.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I wonder what the sound of the dying server will be like? A bang or a hum?
Ah, but the medium would be very dense, so the speed of sound would be high. And, if the soundwaves were longer, they *wouldn't* destructively interfere except at very specific wavelengths. You'd get a phasey, comb-filter effect - rather like a jet plane going overhead.
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.
They haven't quite worked it out. There are some competing theories about but nothing that results from some fundemental mechanism (think relativity+quantum physics). Below are the two I have heard talked about.
1) Inflationary model.
The universe went through a period of extreme expansion from about a trillionth of a second to a billionth of a second where it expanded much faster than light through some unknown mechanism.
2) Variable light speed.
Light itself has changed it speed during the evolution of the universe.
Also you have to keep in mind that we are talking about the surface of the universe which does not necissarily have to follow the same rules as what is inside of it.
But, as an observer, you either had to be a part of that "singularity" to "hear" it (certainly couldn't exist as a human in those circumstances) or you had to be separate from the singularity. (Not even sure you could exist outside... Wouldn't you need SPACE and/or TIME for that?) Within the event horizon? Not going to exist for long! Outside of the event horizon? All vacuum, no sound. DURING the event? You just became some of the matter flung all directions.
The point of this mental drivel? The idea of the Big Bang having any sort of sound is absurd. Kinda like downloading ice cream...
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
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.
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.
I can only swim about 3 miles per hour. If you put the swimming pool on the back of a truck, I could still only swim at 3 mph within the water, but that doesn't mean that there would be a 3 mph limit on the truck moving the pool itself.
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.
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)
In recent news, Atari has sued God for patent infringement. Patent #6,370,256,375 covers a "two-dimensional wrap-around domain," such as the one in Pac-Man. A spokesman for Atari is reported as stating, "Although this violation appears to be in three dimensions, we beleive it is a close derivative and still covered by the patent." When it was pointed out that the patent was not issued until the late 1900s C.E., Atari responded with, "It may be very well that God created this before we did, but there is no prior art since the evidence did not surface until after our patent was granted. If it were the case that clear evidence was given beforehand, our patent would be invalidated. However, here, the patent holds."
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Hmmm, make a note for Human Species 2.0 design specs:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
See this website:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.ht ml
This is an in-depth analysis of the arguments that Lerner presents in his book.
Lots of scientists question the Big Bang theory, all the time. Most of them come away with their questions answered by it. Many others come away thinking that there are still questions that science needs to address. A very few come away believing that their questions haven't been adequately answered, or that there is a better answer. It's just that the Big Bang theory is a simple, straightforward theory that happens to describe the observations we see, and does a very good job of explaining a number of disparate observations. Some still disagree with it, and indeed one of them wrote a review article in the latest issue of "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics". They aren't ignored; they just don't have the weight of evidence on their side at the moment!
There's no conspiracy going on here. Move along.
-Rob
I'm curious to know when exactly you think that these thousands of scientists are daily studying evolution - because I'm betting they're only studying those portions of evolutionary theory that also are a part of the creationist model.
Of course, there are examples of false evolutionary predictions that have had dangerous medical effects. Take for example the philosophy that humans and other creatures would have many vestigial organs. That has turned out to be ~0. And there's the example of back treatment based on the false assumption that our ancestors walked like apes. That cause more problems until a creationist started treating patients on the assumption that the back is designed perfectly as it is. Read more here.
My recommendation is that you explore the whole of that theory of evolution that creationists reject, and see whether the pieces really do fit together.
Bear in mind, if you don't understand how a creationist can accept natural selection (which is a part of the creationist model) and still consider themselves sane/credible, then you have a lot to learn about our position. As I've said many times, I am yet to find an evolutionist who understands our position. And to me, that speaks volumes of people who are so quick to condemn something they haven't even taken the time to understand and evaluate.