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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Subatomic Sound

They have made a thing sounds like a thing of atomic size that allows you to hear the sound of an atom if you had ears that could tune to twenty octaves higher than the top note on a piano.

Yet--this is perhaps even more amazing. Actually I think it really is. It's about your actual physical ear. My friend Douglas Kahn convinced me after sending me a really dope acoustics book.

Your eardrum, when hearing the quietest sound it can hear, vibrates with an amplitude shorter than many many times smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Think about it. This is a quantum scale dimensionality.

1 comment:

  1. That is trippy--It's as though we're not hearing the subatomic, but then we already were. It sends shockwaves through the 18th-c. idea that you can get away from such infinitesimal noise: just hear nice medium sounds, not too loud, not too soft, the right variation. Leibniz, though, seems in tune with the trippiness.

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