“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


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:

Unknown said...

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.