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'The Universe began not with a bang but with a low moan, building into a roar that gave way to a deafening hiss. And those sounds gave birth to the first stars.
'...Translating the observed frequency spectrum directly to sound yields tones far too low for ears to hear - some 50 octaves below middle A - but transpose the score up all those octaves and you can listen to it.
'...As for volume, the intensity of the variations corresponds to about 110 decibels, as loud as a rock concert. Whittle has also used the best available cosmological models to map the way the vibrations evolved over time, showing how the chords of the big bang changed over the Universe's first million years or so.
'...You can listen to the sound from the first million years after the big bang here (0.5 Mb .wav file). The sound has been compressed to five seconds, with the volume held constant.
'...For those worried that you cannot have sounds in space, that is true today, but it was not so in the Universe's infancy. For perhaps its first million years, the Universe was small and dense enough that sound waves could indeed travel through it - so efficiently, in fact, that they moved at about half the speed of light.'
- New Scientist 09 June 04
Any comments? I love this kind of stuff, it gives me a slightly more visceral relationship to science (in a good way - as opposed to, say for example, being bombed, which would be a visceral relationship to science in a bad way). I'm also fairly impressed that the beginning of the universe was 'as loud as a rock concert' and love the idea of a piece of music actually beginning with this sample and continuing with the hiss throughout (although nothing overtly About The Universe prog-rock-stylee, please). |
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