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Listen To The Universe On Your iPod
ptorrone writes "The New York Times had a great story about Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia who has taken the cosmic background radiation of the universe and made a series of sounds. The folks over at Engadget made the sounds available in MP3s so you can listen to them on your computer, iPod or whatever. Also, If you'd like to read more about Dr. Mark Whittle's work visit his site, there are a lot of presentations and information regarding Big Bang Acoustics."
People have also turned gravitational wave simulations into sound files. Gravitational radiation can be a hard concept to explain to people, but make it into a sound file and it helps people (non-physicists) grasp the idea. Here's a page with a set of audio files for inspiral into Kerr Black holes.
A few years ago I made an audio file out of the gravitational wave background in our galaxy (from white-dwarf binary stars). It sounded rather like listening to the ocean... I wish I had kept a copy.
What method did the professor use to turn the radiation into music?
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
Reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut short story called "The Euphio Question". Someone discovers accidentally that if certain deep-space signals are amplified from a radio telescope and broadcast, it causes ultimate euphoria in the listener. A good read (like all of his work).
1. Turn your tv to an unused channel
2. Turn the brightness all the way up
3. Turn the contrast all the way down
4. ????
5. 1% of the dots are energy left over from the big bang. (PROFIT!)
It's the acoustic equivalent of a false color image.
Yes, exactly. And false-color images are used in astronomy all the time for a very good reason: they take information measured in wavelengths beyond the visual range and present it in a way that can be quickly understood by a human. It's not just about making pretty pictures (although I would say that's a bonus in some cases) - it's about presenting information in a human-understandable form. Of course you could process your IR or X-Ray astronomy pictures in a way that never involves making a visual representation of them, but then you miss out on the insight that comes from processing the image visually, which our brains are designed to do.
Likewise with gravitational waves: we have no biological way of experiencing them directly. We can measure them with sophisticated intstruments like LIGO and LISA (or at least we hope to soon). Any representation of a waveform is artificial, whether it be a plot, a datafile, or and audio file. And each format can be used to emphasize a different aspect of the data. In the case of gravitational waves, some of the frequency bands overlap with the sound frequencies the human ear is sensitive to - no need for artificially tweaking the frequencies to make it audible.
So I would strongly disagree that such representations interfere with understanding. As long as you are not misrepresenting the process you use to make a sound file or false-colour image, I would say they can only enhance our experience and understanding - for scientists as well as the general public.
Except in the Silmarillion, the creation was likened to an extremely complex symphony, whereas this is just white noise.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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My guess is: probably not. Something about the iPod just drives these people nuts.
False color is good for looking at geometric data. If you want to know where objects lie in an image, you can overlay and false color some intensity maps at a few different wavelengths. That is very useful. A lot of the time, it's done just to impress the peasants, of course.
/.ers complain about.
With this data, the temporality of it renders it pretty much worthless to the human ear. Anything you can detect by ear will very easily be seen in a simple Fourier transform or similar technique. A Fourier transform and a plot against logarithmic time is probably the best (most efficient and informative) way to visualize it.
Image processing is still not very good at identifying features, unless those features are very well stereotyped. This happens to be a part of my current work, albeit with time-series acquired microscopic images (EM, laser scanning, etc). The human eye/brain will pick up on visual cues that the best algorithms will miss. The algorithms themselves are generally designed/trained based on analysis conducted by eye.
Picking out 2/3D phenomena is where false color images can be useful. Simple grayscale intensity images are often just as good or better (I worked for a professor that insisted on keeping color channels separate during viewing). Listening to 1D data, you won't learn anything new that the computer couldn't have told you.
I know this was done just for the sake of doing something neat. And, I don't fault it for that. What does bother me, however, is that now you'll have some NYT-reading, liberal artsy, pseudo-intellectual douchebags running around thinking that the Universe plays an audible tone. In the end, they only get half the facts down and make up the rest, then go on to propogate that misinformation.
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand. Is it worth it to only give them half the facts? Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
It's a PR stunt, to get people interested in cosmology and to give back to the people who actually pay taxes to fund experiments like WMAP and stuff.
I am perfectly happy with hanging shiny objects to the public. If they are interested, they'll ask more questions, and who knows, the younger ones might get excited enough to want to find out more (and pursue a career in science). If they don't bother to find out more, then fine with me, someone got to keep things like the water supply running.
So, all the power to those people who spend time doing such things.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Has anyone but me read the book The Stardroppers by John Brunner? In this book, "stardropping" is the latest hype. Using portable receivers, people listen to cosmic background radiation. What they hear is not only noise and static...
Sounds like Brunner's story from 1972 has become reality :-)
(And yes, I know, we don't carry receivers, but the resemblance with the plot is still striking :-)
/virtual void