TEDTalks this weekend (via the Huffington Post) has Sounds of the Universe! which is pretty cool and then a post on What Color is the Universe? (kind of gray, like the sky on a cloudy day).
Sounds of the Universe! Color of the Universe! Sounds like acid to me. Oh, those were good times. Does anybody do acid any more?
The Composite Color is a Light Gray
It sort of sounds to me like something serious scientists shouldn’t be doing, it sounds more like Mythbusters. As serious science, I thought trying to find “the music of the spheres” went out with Alchemy and the theory of spontaneous generation. Even in the 70s, as were were short-circuiting our brain boxes in the search for a higher consciousness, it was mostly metaphor and poetry.
So, I wonder now, did some take that search a bit more literally than me? Are our major observatories in the hands of a bunch of stoner geeks whose main purpose in life is figuring out what different cosmic objects sound like and what would be the composite color of the universe if it could be composited which is silly because it’s gazillions of light years across or something and most of it’s empty space, and mastering Klingon irregular verbs?
Maybe. Which is cool.
But “hearing” and “seeing,” for this experiment, are not defined the way we usually define them. It’s more like radio waves that are emitted and then as they are interpreted by our earthbound sensors, but I guess that’s hearing, too. I mean, you couldn’t be actually listening to the sun in space, either, because you’d be inside a space suit.
So this is it. And it’s cool. Because it does advance the cause of science a little bit, in a specific direction, and just because I can’t see its real life application at this point in time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t others who can.
www.gurukalehuru.com 