From: Allan Goodall <agoodall@a...>
Date: 21 Jul 2000 07:43:41 -0700
Subject: [OT -ish] Sound In Space
Lieutenant Hudson stared at his consoles, mesmerized. Pulse torpedoes streaked through space leaving a yellow trail on the tactical display. A large red dot that was the FSE's Bonaparte sat in the middle of the screen. Though the torpedoes and the capital ship were moving towards a collision, only the torpedoes appeared to be moving, as if sucked in by the ship's gravity well. Hudson shifted to the visual view. The torpedoes hit. Even at more than two kilometres away, the flare was bright enough that the screen compensated, momentarily dulling the image. The ship, already crippled, began to spew florescent waste in a crack in her hull. The Bonaparte's hull began to glow red. Hudson's eyes widened before he instinctively -- and needlessly -- turned away from the screen. The compensators kicked in as the monitor flared bright white. A simultaneous high-pitched sizzling cascaded through the NAC Vimy Ridge, followed by a sharp crack and another flare. "What was that?" cried the ensign sitting beside Hudson. "Cascade failure. She lost her warp core." Hudson turned back to the screen. The sizzling sound was disipating, but there were a couple of sharp cracks as core collapsed on itelf. In a few seconds, all that was left of the Bonaparte was a torrent of sparkling dust and a receding ball of plasma. --- Okay, the scientific among you will look at the above and chuckle. Obviously the work of some hack ignorant of science, right? First off, there can be no sound in space. Second, even if there was, sound travels slower than light (assuming that it's propogating through a gas). There's no way that even in a non-vacuum state that the sound of the explosion could have carried at the same speed as the image. Well... perhaps there is. I read an interesting article on http://www.space.com about something called electrophonic sound. It's a rare phenomenon, but now fairly well documented. People have reported hearing the sound of meteors streaking through the sky above them and have heard the meteors die as they burn up in the atmosphere. However, there is no time delay between what they saw and what they heard. Scientists, of course, scoffed for over a century, but there is now enough evidence to support this. Basically, there are enough megawatts of energy in a meteor's descent through the atmosphere that it gives off low-frequency radiation. This radiation then, in turn, causes objects on the ground to vibrate. This can be anything from eyeglasses to dental fillings to pine needles to the observer's hair. The reason for the sound appearing to happen instantaneously is because the vibration occurs in objects close to the observer. When I heard about this, I thought it would make an interesting filler in science fiction novels. Movies have, for a long time, added sound in space just to make it more interesting. Now it appears there could be a scientific reason for it. The Death Star may explode with a thunderous roar, but the roar is more likely to be a sharp crack, and more than likely to come from Luke's crash helmet and visor than the Death Star itself. I thought the list would find this interesting. Here's the URL to the full story: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/electrophonic_sound_00 0706.html