The Sound of Hydrogen

It's like the sound of silence... only louder
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Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

This episode is a little bit different from the norm, because I've created the sound of hydrogen - or, that is, what if it would sound like if it emitted sound instead of light waves!

• Category

  Science & Technology

[schneider418]

Hello Hydrogen my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

Because a fission softly creeping

Left its seeds while I was sleeping

[xXRavenMassacreXx]

I hear that noise when it is dead silent in my house

[Divine Linker]

i think youre right. i saw the minutephysics tutorial on how they generated the sound. i thought it was meaningless because i thought that the sound is based purely on some vibration frequency number. they used some function(actually experimental data, but it reduces to same in ideal conditions) which SEEMS to output a aperiodic wave form, therefore it conveys more information. still, sound still sound pretty periodic to me. they generated the sound okay, but i still feel its meaningless.

[Christian Gorski]

Our brains usually understand sound more in terms of ratios between different frequencies than in terms of the frequencies themselves. When you hear a trumpet, the overtones have the (roughly) same ratio of frequency and volume to the fundamental no matter what note is played, and that is what gives it its timbre. I think mr. minutephysics has preserved the "timbre" of hydrogen, but played the "pitch" in an audible range. It's as meaningful as such a light-to-sound transposition can be.

[fsxaircanada01]

That's probably your furnace

[Divine Linker]

fuck...its just like i took the 50th prime number and put that number as frequency in the sound generator, then CHANGE it to make it audible(no need in this case) and then call that sound the sound of number 229. it doesnt mean shit.

[Andrew Hearn]

Perhaps the sound is actually coming from within him?

[Jared Dutelle]

then it wouldn't be dead silent

[ace ervite]

yea

[ace ervite]

fuck windows ill buy a mac

[xcalper]

this sound makes me feel lonely and empty, wtf

[sKRAPtheRIpPER]

and linux? :D