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Big Bang Really a Big Hum

Posted by michael on from the letdown dept.

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."

5 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big Bang? by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Listen to the Big Bang by rpiquepa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Ommmm... Yoga by 3Suns · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Re:The sound of one hand clapping. by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.
  5. Re:Location by Ianoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.