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The Quietest Place On Earth Will Cause You To Hallucinate In 45 Minutes
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Industry Tap reports that there is a place so quiet you can hear your heart beat, your lungs breathe and your stomach digest. It's the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs in Minnesota where 3ft of sound-proofing fiberglass wedges and insulated steel and concrete absorbs 99.99% of sound, making it the quietest place in the world. 'When it's quiet, ears will adapt,' says the company's founder and president, Steven Orfield. 'The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You'll hear your heart beating, sometimes you can hear your lungs, hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.' The chamber is used by a multitude of manufacturers, to test how loud their products are and the space normally rents for $300 to $400 an hour. 'It's used for formal product testing, for research into the sound of different things — heart valves, the sound of the display of a cellphone, the sound of a switch on a car dashboard.' But the strangest thing about the chamber is that sensory deprivation makes the room extremely disorienting, and people can rarely stay in the dark space for long. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to experience visual and aural hallucinations. 'We challenge people to sit in the chamber in the dark — one reporter stayed in there for 45 minutes,' says Orfield who says even he can't stand the quiet for more than about 30 minutes. Nasa uses a similar chamber to test its astronauts putting them in a water-filled tank inside the room to see 'how long it takes before hallucinations take place and whether they could work through it.'"
I've been in an anechoic chamber - it is quite strange, when you talk it feels like your voice is being sucked out of you.
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I think they just found a new enhanced interrogation technique.
A new one, hardly. They've been using it for 50 years. http://www.salon.com/2007/06/07/sensory_deprivation/
But can we really call a place where sound doesn't exist "quiet".
Yes, "quiet" is defined as the absence of sound without specification of the reason for its absence. If not we will need a new word to describe the "quiet due to the absence of anything to vibrate"-ness of space.
In the same way we can't call vacuum "cold" because there is no temperature.
That's not actually correct - we can measure the temperature of a vacuum from the blackbody radiation spectrum it contains. For example deep space, away from any nearby heat source like a star, has a temperature of 2.7K due to the cosmic microwave background radiation.
And selective coatings with different absorption and emission spectra could change the reading of the thermometer.
This is absolutely untrue. If it was true, it would be trivial to build a perpetual motion heat engine powered by the temperature difference between the thermometer and its environment. Maintaining a heat gradient requires an input of energy, not just a passive "special coating".
Of course every thermometer, in every circumstance, measures its own temperature. But what is that temperature going to be? Even in a vacuum, it's absorbing and radiating photons, which are constantly swishing around. If it's in a perfect vacuum chamber, the walls are emitting photons, and these get absorbed by the thermometer until it emits them just as often as it absorbs them. This is how an object in a vacuum chamber comes into thermal equilibrium with the walls. Electromagnetic radiation does not need a medium in order to propagate.