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."

Comments

Re:Big Bang?

[Transient0]

The entirety of all matter constituting the eventual univers hardly qualifies as a vacuum when highly concentrated.

Re:Big Bang?

[Ianoo]

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.

You had to be there really

[maharg]

.. most of the action was over after 10e-30 seconds

Listen to the Big Bang

[rpiquepa]

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.

Ommmm... Yoga

[3Suns]

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...

Re:The "Big Bang" could not have made any sound

[DShard]

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.

For all those space is a vacuum commenters

[onyxruby]

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.

Re:The sound of one hand clapping.

[Ianoo]

It's a hypothesis, just like the Big Bang itself. There's no real way to "prove" it, except inventing a time machine. People don't seem to get what science is all about. No-one can ever be 100% sure of a theory. In the case of the Big Bang:

1. We observe that things seem to be moving away from eachother pretty rapidly.
   
2. We note that if things are moving away from eachother, it's quite likely they all started out in the same place. So we formulate the Big Bang hypothesis.
   
3. We go out and look to see if our new hypothesis can predict any interesting things, like star formation or black holes, or whether it fits nicely with other theories like Relativity, for which we already have compelling evidence.
4. We do experiments to test these predictions. An experiment can also be an observation, in the sense that the entire universe can be viewed as one big continual experiment about which we can record results.

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.

the humming chicken and the egg

[splateagle]

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...

Re:Big Bang?

[dido]

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.

Re:Location

[Ianoo]

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.

Re:Big Bang?

[pegr__]

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...