The Sound of Hydrogen
It's like the sound of silence... only louder Tweet it - http://bit.ly/pGlpub Facebook it - http://on.fb.me/pHeQT5 minutephysics is now on Google+ - http://bit.ly/qzEwc6 And facebook...
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Sounds ethereal, right? This is the sound of hydrogen, the most common element in theuniverse. It's the simplest atom, the building block of stars, and the stuff that turns unsaturatedfat into saturated fat. It also blew up the Hindenburg.But how are we listening to hydrogen? It doesn't normally make noise, does it? Well, atomichydrogen absorbs and emits radiation at certain frequencies: its atomic spectrum. And, ifhydrogen emitted sound waves instead of light waves, this is what it would sound like (thoughI did pitch-shift it down so it would be audible to the human ear)So, just like you might have seen false-color pictures of galaxies and planets made by shiftinginfrared or radio-wave images into the visible spectrum, this is a false-pitch sound, shiftedinto ...
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Sounds ethereal, right? This is the sound of hydrogen, the most common element in theuniverse. It's the simplest atom, the building block of stars, and the stuff that turns unsaturatedfat into saturated fat. It also blew up the Hindenburg.But how are we listening to hydrogen? It doesn't normally make noise, does it? Well, atomichydrogen absorbs and emits radiation at certain frequencies: its atomic spectrum. And, ifhydrogen emitted sound waves instead of light waves, this is what it would sound like (thoughI did pitch-shift it down so it would be audible to the human ear)So, just like you might have seen false-color pictures of galaxies and planets made by shiftinginfrared or radio-wave images into the visible spectrum, this is a false-pitch sound, shiftedinto ...
