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Space Science

Big Bang Really a Big Hum 452

Posted by michael 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."
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Big Bang Really a Big Hum More

Big Bang Really a Big Hum

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  • Big Bang? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by captainclever ( 568610 )
    Sound doesn't travel thru space (a vacuum) right... so how can you hear the big bang?

    • Re:Big Bang? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Transient0 ( 175617 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:30AM (#7346500) Homepage
      The entirety of all matter constituting the eventual univers hardly qualifies as a vacuum when highly concentrated.

      • Re:Big Bang? (Score:3, Funny)

        by DShard ( 159067 )
        You mean that the unvierse has _stuff_ in it? no, no, no... At the big bang it was all empty space on the backs of turtles. Below the turtles were more turtles. Eventually the unverse cooled down and expanded enough that the turtles got sucked in. The process of turtles falling into the universe caused matter to be created.
        • Stephen Hawking in A Brief History Of Time starts with the anecdote. A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a
          public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

          At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
          tortoise

    • Re:Big Bang? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:30AM (#7346503) Journal
      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.

      • Re:Big Bang? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dido ( 9125 ) <dido@NoSpAM.imperium.ph> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:46AM (#7346612)

        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:Big Bang? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:52AM (#7346653) Homepage
          Ah, but the medium would be very dense, so the speed of sound would be high. And, if the soundwaves were longer, they *wouldn't* destructively interfere except at very specific wavelengths. You'd get a phasey, comb-filter effect - rather like a jet plane going overhead.

        • Re:Big Bang? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Reverberant ( 303566 )
          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.

          The wavelengths of the vibrations have nothing to do with the size of the propagating medium. Some funny things can happen if the wavelength is much bigger than the the propagating medium (for example, think of a low frequen

      • So all the matter was in one point, the rest was vacumn.... So the listener at 1 light year would hear nothing?

      • Re:Big Bang? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by pegr__ ( 144172 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:58AM (#7346706) Homepage
        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...
      • 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.

        All you people who keep complaining that 'You couldn't really hear a TIE Fighter like that!', or 'The Death Star couldn't really make a shockwave like that--it's in a vacuum!'--this is why.

      • Re:Big Bang? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @03:27PM (#7351313) Homepage Journal

        ...sound vibrations...

        Hmmm, make a note for Human Species 2.0 design specs:

        • coat eardrums with metallized layers to pick up EM waves instead of just acoustic pressure waves,
        • get finger tips metallized with electrochemical charging so hand-waving arguments are adequate communication
    • It also makes you wonder why they call it the "Big Bang" anyway.

      *shrug*

      • It also makes you wonder why they call it the "Big Bang" anyway.

        I don't care what kind of noise it was making inside, but anything that accelerates the entire mass of the universe to high velocities in 1.0e-100 seconds qualifies as a "big bang" for me. ;-)

        • I was always under the impression that a "bang" was a sound. By your standards, it should have been called the "Big Detonation", which does imply an explosive situation, without making any assumptions about sound.

          Same goes for "crunch" as in "The Big Crunch". Also has distinct sonical implications.

          In the end, my point of the grandparent post was that the whining about "you don't have sound in space, so this is ridiculous" is in fact ridiculous itself :)

          Space, in fact, is a pretty noisy place. Take bac

          • I was always under the impression that a "bang" was a sound.

            I guess I'd go with Merriam Webster's first definition:

            1 : to strike sharply

            Bear in mind that it was named by an astronomer, not an English major. ;-)

      • "...makes you wonder why they call it the "Big Bang"..."

        Creation of the universe, my man. It's when God got his shwerve on.

        • ...It's when God got his shwerve on.

          You mean when Dee-dee (Dexter's sister) pressed the blinkey shiney red button that was labeled "Don't press zis buutton!".

          Right?

    • Re:Big Bang? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Davak ( 526912 )
      From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across. At that time the sound waves were too low in frequency to be audible. To hear them, Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times.

      I am not sure of the scientific strength of a study where you take some extremely, extremely small number multiply it times "100,000 billion billion"... and then try to m
    • From the article:
      Giant sound waves propagated through the blazing hot matter that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. These squeezed and stretched matter, heating the compressed regions and cooling the rarefied ones.

    • Re:Big Bang? (Score:2, Informative)

      by sinucus ( 85222 )
      and here I am thinking this whole time that slashdotters were intelligent. Another dream I once had shot down in the flaming vacuum of space. OMG I said flames in space, how could that be, because you need air to have fire, right? I think http://www.badastronomy.com would be a useful link for most of you people who have absolutly NO understanding of anything outside of the 6 inches of grey matter inside that skull of yours.

  • Hum? Huh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) * on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:29AM (#7346494) Homepage Journal
    I guess it just didn't know the words.

  • sound? (Score:2)

    by stray ( 73778 )

    "The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night," he says.


    So, tell me again how jet planes sound different in the middle of the night as opposed to, say, at 10 am?

    • Re:sound? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Ian Wolf ( 171633 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:33AM (#7346521) Homepage
      Living on final for an international airport, I can answer this.

      In the middle of the night, its more annoying.
    • Sound: jet engines

      Distance: football fields

      Mass: Volkswagons (a 16" gun can shoot a volkswagon 20 miles).

      Amount of data: Number of Library of Congresses.

    • Re:sound? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 )
      So, tell me again how jet planes sound different in the middle of the night as opposed to, say, at 10 am?

      Well, I wasn't the first one to tell you, but commercial jet planes landing past certain hours modulate the landing to produce less noise. I'm sure that somebody with more knowledge can elaborate, but due to regulations around airports, night passes have the much tighter rein on engine power and/or "shuttering" (I have no idea the technical term). In addition, they are fined at most airports for comi

  • The sound of one hand clapping. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DShard ( 159067 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:30AM (#7346501)
    And how do you verify what it sounded like. This seems like the jumped a few steps in the scientific method.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's right, because a scientist didn't do this, and the person who did do this decided to make it up as he went along.

      RTFA.

    • Re:The sound of one hand clapping. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:45AM (#7346604) Journal
      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.

      • Re:The sound of one hand clapping. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @11:10AM (#7348020) Journal

        any scientist will regard such things just as the best model based on some compelling evidnece, but will never put blind faith in it.

        There's ample historical evidence to disprove this theory, unfortunately. Many scientists get tied to particular theories and cannot be dissuaded from them. In the face of evidence that appears to contradict their theories, they try to find ways to discredit the evidence or demonstrate through some logical sleight of hand that it does fit their theory. Or sometimes they just ignore it.

        This is because scientists are people and people are imperfect. However, science as a whole is pretty effective at discarding bad theories, even if scientists aren't. It just takes a generation or two.

        It's also important to remember that bad theories, once established, do not die until a theory that is clearly better comes along. Until then, the bad theory is kept, and patched to fit the evidence.

        Science is a fine process for understanding the observable world, but it's a good idea to understand its limitations as well as its strengths. One must be skeptical of skepticism :-)

  • sound (Score:3, Informative)

    by lordmetroid ( 708723 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:32AM (#7346512)
    Even if sound can't travel through space due to the the sparse particles to set in motion... their should still be some particles set in motion after all they were created in pretty much the same instance as the sound itself were created...
  • So are we standing outside the universe to hear this sound, or are we in the vacuum of space?

    Right.

    • Re:Location (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:53AM (#7346661) Journal
      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:Location (Score:4, Funny)

        by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @12:17PM (#7348836) Homepage Journal
        In recent news, Atari has sued God for patent infringement. Patent #6,370,256,375 covers a "two-dimensional wrap-around domain," such as the one in Pac-Man. A spokesman for Atari is reported as stating, "Although this violation appears to be in three dimensions, we beleive it is a close derivative and still covered by the patent." When it was pointed out that the patent was not issued until the late 1900s C.E., Atari responded with, "It may be very well that God created this before we did, but there is no prior art since the evidence did not surface until after our patent was granted. If it were the case that clear evidence was given beforehand, our patent would be invalidated. However, here, the patent holds."

  • Sound (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hythlodaeus ( 411441 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:35AM (#7346529)
    AFAIK, the density of matter approached infinity as you went back to the moment of the big bang (since the volume approached 0.) I don't know how long it lasted, but for at least awhile there would have been enough density for sound to propagate.

  • Hum? (Score:4, Funny)

    by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:37AM (#7346542)
    I would never describe a jet plane passing over my house as a "hum".

    I used to camp in an area where Air Force F-16's and A-10s would fly very low to approach a target range about 10 miles away. An F-16 sounds more like screeching, earth-shattering death at 100 feet than a "hum".

    And if the afterburners are on, forget it. YUO = Temporarily deaf!

  • You had to be there really (Score:5, Funny)

    by maharg ( 182366 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:37AM (#7346543) Homepage Journal
    .. most of the action was over after 10e-30 seconds

  • Listen to the Big Bang (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rpiquepa ( 644694 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:38AM (#7346558) Homepage
    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 [weblogs.com] gives you more details on his work and his writings. You also can read his column, "BOOMERanG and the Sound of the Big Bang [washington.edu]," It has been published in January 2001 and amended in September 2003.
  • Juat a WAG? (Wild Ass Guess?)

    there is no way in hell you can get any data off of the actual event, all you can gather is the residual effects that are still lingering.

    so this is what it's like now, 20 bajillion years later and we are trying to extroplate back to the event horizon based on a infentecimal amount of data.

    great.

    • Actually, we have very accurate data telling us what the spectrum of acoustic oscillations or "sound" was at the time of the "decoupling" of photons and matter, which was only about 350,000 years after the big bang. You might want to check out the technical papers coming out of the WMAP project [nasa.gov], to which I have no affiliation. They've produced the most accurate maps of this acoustic noise, and this is the data that was used to make the "sound recordings". Seems kosher to me, and IAANP, so you can trust m

  • From the article:

    From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across. At that time the sound waves were too low in frequency to be audible. To hear them, Cramer had to scale the frequencies 100,000 billion billion times.

    I don't get this (but then, this isn't my cup of tea either). If the universe started out as a small dot how can it be 18 million light years wide aft
    • Expansion of the universe is not a physical movement through space. It is a rate of change of the physical properties of space ie. space is stretching or to be more precise, light shifts more to the red as it travels now than it did fifteen billion years ago.

    • Re:Something wrong in the article? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DShard ( 159067 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:54AM (#7346670)
      They haven't quite worked it out. There are some competing theories about but nothing that results from some fundemental mechanism (think relativity+quantum physics). Below are the two I have heard talked about.

      1) Inflationary model.

      The universe went through a period of extreme expansion from about a trillionth of a second to a billionth of a second where it expanded much faster than light through some unknown mechanism.

      2) Variable light speed.

      Light itself has changed it speed during the evolution of the universe.

      Also you have to keep in mind that we are talking about the surface of the universe which does not necissarily have to follow the same rules as what is inside of it.
    • So how long did it take sound to travel 18 million light years?

      And is that billion English or American. IF english then it Trillion Trillion!!! That is allow more 0's.

      I have a data compression alogrythm that stores every thing into 1 bit. Decompression routine is instantous via a "Big Bang"

  • Big bang didn't do "bang" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MSBob ( 307239 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:42AM (#7346583)
    Big bang was not really an explosion per se. In fact all the matter in the universe has not changed its position since the beginning of the universe. Instead it's space itself that got "stretched" ie. the time for light to reach two distinct points in the universe has increased over the last fifteen billion years. The escape of galaxies works the same way.

    There was no big cluster of mass that exploded like a bomb. It is simply that space itself expanded, meaning that the shift to the red has increased for the light travelling between two disctinct points in the universe.

  • Ommmm... Yoga (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 3Suns ( 250606 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:42AM (#7346586) Homepage
    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...

  • Sound is what brain calls the netural signal that was picked up by a audio reciever that is listening in medium, normally air. The wave in air moves around 700 mph, in other mediums faster or slower.

    1) Who was listening?
    2) What was the medium at say 1 light year from "bang"?
    3) Did the listener get killed because the light pulse got there first? Hence never hear the sound, so what sound?
    4) Do bear use the woods as W.C.s?

  • For all those space is a vacuum commenters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby@ c o m c a s t . net> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:44AM (#7346601)
    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 [kuro5hin.org] some time back about this that goes into just a touch more detail about ramifications for this sound.

  • the humming chicken and the egg (Score:5, Insightful)

    by splateagle ( 557203 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:45AM (#7346608)
    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...
    • 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?

      As 50 people have been refuted and corrected but you still don't seem to get it here goes:

      All the matter in the universe was packed together. *That is a freaking medium through which sound can move*

      This was done over a time period of

  • Heh heh (Score:4, Funny)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @08:49AM (#7346636) Homepage Journal
    Slashdotting a .wav file :)

    I wonder what the sound of the dying server will be like? A bang or a hum?

  • How did the universe get 18 million light years across in just 760,000 years? Seems that something would have had to travel faster than light to get far away.

    There is no sound in space. Slashdot told me so. Even though they all love star wars, which has lots of sound in space.

  • Cosmic drum 'n Bass (Score:2, Informative)

    by Potor ( 658520 )
    I hope this is not too OT, but here is the sound of a pulsar, xi Hydrae [eso.org] (eos.org; realaudio), as captured by a team from my university (KULeuven). The link comes from this page [eso.org] (eso.org).

    Enjoy some truly cosmic drum 'n bass!

  • Amazing.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AgentGray ( 200299 )
    No one was there to listen to it, but we've proven it was a hum. Let alone, we've never proved that there was a big bang to begin with.

    People will believe what they hear if they hear it over and over and over and over and over...

    No, I didn't intend to troll...I won't post any replies to this post.
  • It should be known as "THE HORRENDOUS SPACE KABLOOEY!!"

    I think thats pretty good...

    --rhad

  • , 'The Big Bang sounded more like a deep hum than a bang, according to an analysis of the radiation left over from the cataclysm.

    Kinda like on pork n' beans night when dad decided to let off one of his big ol' stinky farts. This is just silly to say the least.

  • From these variations, he could calculate the frequencies of the sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years, when it was just 18 million light years across.

    Can this be correct? If the universe was 760'000 years old and 18 million light years across that would mean that the matter was traveling over 10 times the speed of light. If it travelled at the speed of light surely it would only reach 760'000 light years in each direction. That doesnt add up to 18 million to me.

    • Re:Faster than the speed of light? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Space itself streched, the matter did not move apart. Think of a ballon with dots on it, as you inflate the balloon, the dots move apart due to the stretching of the medium they are embedded in. There are no constraints that we know of on the speed that space can stretch at.

      • Space itself streched, the matter did not move apart. Think of a ballon with dots on it, as you inflate the balloon, the dots move apart due to the stretching of the medium they are embedded in. There are no constraints that we know of on the speed that space can stretch at.

        Ah! Now I understand warp drive technology. It is simply a method of partially relaxing a selected region of current space from its stretched state to a state that is more like its original condition. Hummm, it will require developing

  • in the vacuum of space you can't hear a slashdotted server scream

  • Buddha was right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Ape With No Name ( 213531 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @09:08AM (#7346769) Homepage
    Remember the sound of the Universe is:

    Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  • No big deal (Score:3, Informative)

    by Black Perl ( 12686 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @09:16AM (#7346831)
    This is just taking energy fluctuations and "resampling" and scaling into the narrow band of frequencies (approx. 20Hz-20KHz) that we perceive as sound.

    You can do this with anything--I wouldn't be surprised if some site somewhere lets you "hear" the Sun's recent plasma ejection.

    This is not what you would have heard if you had "been there", folks.

    This kind of pseudo-science is even more useless than the "what color is the universe" articles. I guess people love to be able to relate to hard-to-comprehend things with their senses.

    Nothing to see here, folks, lets just move along and go back to our arguments about whether the universe is shaped like a donut [slashdot.org] or a soccer ball [slashdot.org].

  • mirror of the bigbang (Score:3, Informative)

    by millette ( 56354 ) <robin@NOSPam.millette.info> on Thursday October 30, 2003 @09:27AM (#7346902) Homepage Journal
    Here's an ogg format of the sound file:
    http://tools.waglo.com/bigbang.ogg [waglo.com]
  • Setting aside for a second all the technical details about no sound in space, and speed of light and such, this is still an interesting concept- but not a new one at all.

    One of my favorite passages in Tolkien's work is his story of the creation in The Silmarillion [amazon.com], where Middle Earth flows from the Music of the Ainur. As somebody else already posted, Aslan of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles sang Narnia into existence. And many Eastern religions have associated sound with creation. Even in Genesis (and la [crosswalk.com]
  • In one of those strange coincidences between science and mysticism, Buddhists (and perhaps Hindus as well) posit that reality began as sound alone -- the drone of ohm. That sound is the lowest hum that a human can produce -- and if you ever hear a large group of people do it in concert, it will resonate in every cell of your body, physic-ally speaking.

    Not that this clip sounds anything like an ohm. But it's a fun connection all the same.

    ==========

  • The Buddhists were right!!
    For those who may not know, the "AOM" sound that people make when they are meditating (you know, "a-ummmmmmm") is supposedly the sound the universe made when it was created.

    Chalk one up for them, I suppose.

    --Stephen
  • Turns out the Universe just had a hummer.

  • Some observations (Score:3, Informative)

    by somepunk ( 720296 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @11:13AM (#7348045) Homepage
    First of all, this sound is based on observations of the microwave background radiation, which didn't come into existence until 300,000 years after the big bang. You will note that the article states "when it [the universe] was just 18 million light years across" Imagine beating a drum that big, and you'll see why the pitch is so low. So the big bang may or may not have been a "bang" but 300,000 years later, the sound made was a hum.

    Really, the relevant signal to listen to is the background signal of gravitational waves. These actually correspond rather directly to (faint) sound waves, since they induce mechanical disturbances as they pass through matter. By now, of course, most of these will have stretched to the dimensions of the universe, and be more or less undetectable, even in principle. Some theories predict the existence of higher frequency waves going back to the first moments of the big bang. We can look forward to detecting some higher frequency waves in the next five to ten years, from the various interferometers [caltech.edu] coming online. This is serious science, and could provide insights into not only the origins of the universe, but also supernovae, and the dynamics of black holes and neutron stars. Not to mention curiosities that may occur unheralded. Something akin to the advent of radio astronomy may be in store for us.

    There's also (presumably) a neutrino background, from about one second after the big bang. This will be very hard to detect, until we build a big sister to AMANDA [uci.edu] covering icy orb, perhaps ganymede :) Some folks seem to be trying to detect it indirectly via the microwave background.

    Physicists are entitled to a little fun now and then, anyway. It also helps to bring cosmology a little closer to the general public. It certainly isn't as if this researcher had to get a peer reviewed grant of many thousands of dollars to produce such "trivial" results: he simply did some starightforward processing on data that was already available, quite possibly in his spare time on his own computer. Oh, and I would definitely classify this as more useful/pertinent then that (admittedly a bit silly) "color of the universe stuff"!

    It is not the case that "any" sound can be created, or that there is no relationship to the original, when scaling by 100,000. Many (most) relationships are preserved in this sort of operation. Indeed, a familiar example would be to speed up or slow down normal speech; it remains understandable.

    Science starts with the presumption of ignorance, and then proceeds to discover what the universe can tell us about itself. Many slashdotters could take a lesson from this.

    The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
    Harlan Ellison

  • Another stupid question (Score:3, Funny)

    by scharkalvin ( 72228 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @11:43AM (#7348406) Homepage
    What did the big bang smell like?

    "4 parsics, close enough to smell them!" - Checkov
    "Ensign, smells do not propagate through the vacuum of space" - Spock

  • Believing in the Big Bang (Score:3, Informative)

    by curious.corn ( 167387 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @03:29PM (#7351361)
    The Big Bang was a Troll against catholic physicits pushing a scientifically viable theory to creationism: the primordial egg was proposed by a gesuit priest. Try reading E. J. Lerner's "The big bang never happened", it's a wonderful book and gives pretty sensible explanations to cosmological data; shame that no scientific institution wants to question the enstablishment... perhaps those that run the business built their careers on these theories?

    • Re:Believing in the Big Bang (Score:4, Informative)

      by rknop ( 240417 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @06:32PM (#7353187) Homepage

      See this website:

      http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.ht ml [ucla.edu]

      This is an in-depth analysis of the arguments that Lerner presents in his book.

      Lots of scientists question the Big Bang theory, all the time. Most of them come away with their questions answered by it. Many others come away thinking that there are still questions that science needs to address. A very few come away believing that their questions haven't been adequately answered, or that there is a better answer. It's just that the Big Bang theory is a simple, straightforward theory that happens to describe the observations we see, and does a very good job of explaining a number of disparate observations. Some still disagree with it, and indeed one of them wrote a review article in the latest issue of "Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics". They aren't ignored; they just don't have the weight of evidence on their side at the moment!

      There's no conspiracy going on here. Move along.

      -Rob

  • Other Cramer material (Score:3, Informative)

    by hawkfish ( 8978 ) on Thursday October 30, 2003 @06:30PM (#7353164) Homepage
    Check out the Transactional Interpetation of Quantum Mechanics [washington.edu]. Critiques of all the well known interpretations (CI, MWI) and others you may not have heard of.

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