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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."
Is it coincidental that the MP3s sound an awful lot like a bomb fuse burning and then a toilet flushing?
The Universe was created by the big bang in the high-school men's bathroom!
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.
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What method did the professor use to turn the radiation into music?
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
...if you want to hear the sounds of the Big Bang!
"listen to the universo on your computer"
or
"listen to the universo on your MP3-player"
There is nothing in this story that requires mentioning an iPod. And frankly all the plugs on slashdot are getting a bit tiring.
before this turns up sampled in a hip-hop song?
Fucking A, for the love of free beer, would you stop pimping Apple?
/. editors add/allow such flamebait in the articles just to enjoy the flame fests. And like a retard I just complied....
I think the
Damnit, knew I shouldn't have left the tinfoil hat at home today.
IOException - Can't Speak
If someone can get a bittorrent started, I'll leave it hosted all day at work here. At the moment, I can't even download the file though.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Teenager 2: The universe, man, the universe.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
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).
Just what I need to spend 300 bucks or more on an electronic device to hear the universe.
I have been doing this with a Sea Shell for decades
Some massaging of the data was needed...Dr. Whittle shifted the sounds to the human audible range, producing a chord like the sound of a jet engine. He used computer models to generate the cosmic chords from creation for the first million years and condensed them to five seconds.
I don't know much about sound, but this seems odd to me...if he's editing it this much, at what point is the guy just making his own music?
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Adult Toys
Let me know if you hear sounds in prime number intervals.
so I can *see* the universe.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I just hear some cosmic fart...oh wait my microphone is on.
before Puff Daddy remixes it.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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!)
To experience the original sound of the big bang in all its glory, turn your volume gain up 11 billion deciBels. Amplifiers that only go to +10 GdB gain just wont cut it for true audiophools.
the AC
Some slight hearing loss may occur. Don't try this at home, go to a friends house.
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
There are some other good soundclips on the Sounds of Jupiter site as well; e.g., Jupiter's lightning and the "bow shock."
Personally I would have thought Space Invaders, but I really can't argue with the universe can I?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
I don't understand why the headline had to read iPod instead of mp3. Why not just say you can listen to the mp3? I think more people listen to mp3's from other players (be it computer or a Creative product, etc...) than the iPod.
Perhaps I'm just silly, but I don't think of the iPod as soon as I find an mp3 or a new sound.
... I'll probably listen to the Big Crunch before the Big Bang.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
No, you don't. Nobody does. The best theory of gravity we have is Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which most physicists who understand it believe to be incorrect.
But you're right about conversion of gravity waves to sound waves being useless as an aid to comprehension.
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.
You hear Carl Sagan saying "billlllions and billllions"...
First the Universe, the next thing we'll be listening to is bit-by-bit samples of old *nix binaries.
A set of CDs called "Symphonies of the Planets" which are recordings of magnetic flux in deep space as recorded by voyager probes. I had the fortune to pick up one of the cds on a whim at a Tower Records in about 1992. The one I have is *EXTREMELY* cool and my favorite thing to listen to if I am having trouble sleeping.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Strap This Portable GPS Onto Your Backpack
"WTF, doods? I use a satchel. Don't TELL ME what to use to carry my books!"
Watch The Star Wars Holiday Special On Your TV
"DVD = TV???? I've got a PLASMA you bitches. What is it with the analog bias on Slashdot these days, huh????"
New NASA-developed Lens Cleaner Keeps Glasses Dry In Rain
"Why couldn't you have titled this Eyewear???? I think most people use contacts these days anyway."
My guess is: probably not. Something about the iPod just drives these people nuts.
Pythagoras didn't need an iPod...
Making an audible sound out of it is nonsense. It's almost entirely arbitrary, as the sound is not audible.
The same could be said about numbers. They are arbitrarily scaled and spaced, arbitrary names, arbitrary symbols.
What they are is a model of what is being observed or described. Same with false color images or sounds of the cosmos.
What does 2kg mean? What does the evenly spaced clunk, clunk, clunk of a pulsar mean?
Granted, numbers and math work better for proper scientific understanding, but sounds and false colors can convey meaning to someone who doesn't know the math and physics.
Or do you read Word documents in hex?
I'm sure the original poster views all his IR astronomy images in their most accurate respresentation.
Due to limitations of slashdot, I'm unable to present such an image here, but I can show you the negative of such a photo:
--begin--
--end--
It is not nonsense. (And for the record, this is not insightful but "full of it".) Science is obtuse to 99.9% of the population. To get funding, scientists need to explain to the common folks what their work is in terms they can understand, or, in this case, hear. So what if people have the impression they understand more than what they really do? Isn't this good for science? If science remains obtuse to common folks, what is gained? Are scientists really that full of themselves that they want to sneer on people who think they have an understanding? Now, that is nonsense.
Then again, it's not as though God would find a music industry lawyer in heaven, right?
I'm always torn about trying to explain science to the masses, since they're clearly too dumb/uninterested to ever truly understand.
Have you ever considered that few people would want to listen to someone who starts out with that attitude about them?
I work with a project that places cosmic ray detectors in schools. The goals are both scientific and educational. I have had school security people drop by after their shift to talk and learn more about what we're doing. This - making science accessible and interesting to people - is one of the most rewarding parts of my work. You might be surprised how much "the average joe" can grasp, given the opportunity and the right resources.
Is it worth it to only give them half the facts?
No one is dishing out half-truths. All the relevant information is there. In the original article it clearly states:
I have never seen a similar presentation that didn't include some explanation of how it was done and what the relationship to the original data is.
It seems to me like you are asking, "Is it worth trying to disseminate interesting science even though it might be only partially understood?" To that my answer is that getting some of the information across is enough to make science outreach a worthwhile excercise.
I think it is more important to find creative and interesting ways of engaging people in science than making sure they've got all the facts straight right away. After all, if they you can get someone's interest, they will be motivated to learn more, and then any original misconceptions can be disspelled. If you start out expecting people to learn science by picking up the nearest Astrophysical Journal, it just won't happen.
Don't forget, it's legislators who only understand half the facts that cause most of the problems that
Again - more information, not less, is the answer. There's nothing wrong with presenting data any way you feel like it, as long as you explain what you did. If more scientists were working to publicize their research like this guy is, maybe everyone, politicians included, would realize that science is not something which is the exclusive domain of the specialists in ivory towers. When science is accessible, I think people are more likely to feel that it is of true value, and hence more willing to fund it with their tax dollars.
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.
Definitely sounds like the old defender video game... or else the aliens really do sound like that and Atari managed to hit the nail on the head.... Either way, I'm scared.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
Just this morning saw an Outer Limits episode where teenagers who listened to a certain recording of noise from outer space become zombies and began to turn into aliens. I had to go to work so I didn't catch the twist (not that the Outer Limits really has Twilight Zone quality twists), but it seems a bit strange to me that MP3 records of sound from space would now be made available after I just watched that show this morning. Or maybe I'm just not getting enough sleep.
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