August 02, 2004
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[Abe Simpson]: TURN IT UP!
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Somehow I can't fathom the relevance of a 10^-50 Hz note. How can you even detect a complete cycle, much less hear it?
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Very cool. Two questions ... 1) If these are not sound waves, in what sense can they be said to be "heard"? 2) The 53 hours of Chandra observations revealed a note that is more than a million billion times deeper than what you can hear. (See question 1, ditto.) 3) Keats aside, in what sense can an unheard note be said to be "musical"? Wouldn't the term "musical" indicate some kind of fit (however loose) to the human perceptual apparatus?
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Surely I can't be the only monkey who sees humor in the note being a b-flat?
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What's so funny? Another reason for brass players to consider themselves the centre of the universe is all I can see coming out of this.
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Clarinetists are clearly the center of the universe. Those trumpeters and all their derivatives are so riding our train.
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*hi-fives the low brass monkeys
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The funky monkeys?
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Cam we damce to it?
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Whoa... I remember when I was younger, and my dad was telling me about a particularly wicked acid trip he had. He claimed to had heard the 'frequency of the universe', and being a musician, when he came back down he figured it out. It was a b-flat. And, yeah, b-flat is a hilarious note.
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*makes a Bb farting sound with armpit*
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next discovery: black holes hold men eating beans and watching football.
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I love SideDish. But that was pitifully OT. /twunt
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So the tone of the universe is the Brown Noise...
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I see this thread has brought several band geeks out of the closet.
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Leaving the rest of us who were too geeky and/or tone deaf to join the band still in the cupboard.
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Thus began the most ominous barbershop quartet ever.
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I did show choir and drama in high school, so I have nothing to add... save that when I took a "brass techniques" course for my music education degree, I pretty much sounded like a Wookie in heat for an entire semester.
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Wolof, as far as I can tell these actually _are_ sound waves, in the sense that they involve the repetitive compression and decompression of gas. The author of the story doesn't seem to have a firm grasp over what is and isn't sound an so gets all his wave-related ideas jumbled up a bit - "a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond". Technically, sound can't travel through space, right? And who would describe a music note as travelling "like a ripple on an invisible pond" when plenty of auditory similes would do just fine.
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These waves are more accurately described as density fluctuations in space caused by x-rays emitted by the black hole. The similarity to sound waves is that sound waves are density fluctuations in air (or water or solids) caused by the sound source. Strictly speaking, a sound wave does not imply that a human can hear the sound. On the other hand, I think the description of the wave as a B-flat was just to spice up the press release. If that was the intent, it worked. (This is not recent news. It was reported last September.) Interestingly enough, Steven Weinberg gave a talk to the Acoustical Society of America about sound waves right after the big bang. As the new universe was expanding, the density of it was too great to allow light to travel. So for the first several thousand (hundred thousand? i don't recall) years, all the information that traveled through the universe was carried by pressure (i.e. sound) waves. (Disclaimer: I work in acoustics, not in cosmology.)
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twunt n. Useful, satisfying yet inoffensive combination of two very rude words which can safely be spoken in primmest and properest company. Twat and Cunt. "He's a right twunt!" well, wolof, thnx for the vocab lesson.
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More of a flashboy word really. I only used it because js found it insufferable, and I love self-appointed arbiters of style and hander-outerers of kool kid kred.
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Monkeyfilter: Wookiees in heat. Proper!