The Baby Universe's First Cry: A Million Years in 5 Seconds By KENNETH CHANG Published: June 8, 2004 DENVER, June 2 -If the universe is created with a bang but no one is around to witness it, does it still make a sound? Some 13.7 billion years later, Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, says yes. Sound has played an important role in research on the Big Bang, the explosive birth of the universe. In 1963, trying to track a mysterious hiss generated by their microwave antenna, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs discovered the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow of photons left over from the Big Bang. Satellites now show minuscule ripples in the cosmic microwaves. Dr. Whittle realized that the ripples - slight variations in density of matter that would determine where stars and galaxies would form - could be seen as sound waves bouncing through the infant 380,000-year-old universe. "I have done what is the obvious thing, turning the information into real sounds," said Dr. Whittle, who presented his aural findings here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Sound waves propagate with just the slightest disturbances. The sound of a voice compresses air by one part in five million. The differences in pressure in the primordial gases were 1 part in 10,000, and that corresponds to a satisfyingly loud, but not lethal, 110 decibels - rock concert volume. Some massaging of the data was needed. The cosmic sound waves stretched 20,000 light-years, moved at half the speed of light, and were about 50 octaves below what people can hear. 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. The Big Bang actually erupted in complete silence. In the first instant, the mass of the universe was spread out completely evenly. No pressure differences, no sound. But after that, the quiet vanished. "For the first 400,000 years," Dr. Whittle said, "it sounds like a descending scream falling into a dull roar." Over the first million years, Dr. Whittle said, the music of the cosmos also shifted from a pleasant major chord to a more somber minor one. Listen here: http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~dmw8f/sounds/cdromfiles/index.php
The ear drum converts pressure waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea - the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fl uid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted [transduced] to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. What we call sound exists only in the mind of the perceiver. Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes. In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: "I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound - nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent." Sounds, colors, patterns, etc., appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by the mind. All our experience of the natural world is our minds interpretation of the input it receives (and no one really know what that input is).
yup and there is also no point to living because there is no real purpose in life even though we try to make it out to be like there is a purpose for everything. whats the difference between us and an ant? nothing.
Reality is in the eye of the beholder. I often wonder if the universe as we know it, is just one of many cosmic experiments beyond our comprehension.
The universe only exists if there are conscious beings to perceive it, so mere perception may be the purpose. Sit back, relax, procreate more conscious beings and enjoy the show.
