The Sound Barrier #4: Listen to the universe

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The new Acura ADX. Craft it for more. Explore the Acura ADX at Acura.com. Hello, can you hear me? Ah, caramba. Wanda Diaz-Mercad can make pretty much anything seem special. Can you say one, two, three? Like when I first called her up and we were working through some connection issues. One, two, three. Ah, this is very good. You say one, two, three beautifully. Ah, thanks so much. Or the way she talks about Star Trek. It's awesome, right? It's the best thing that has ever happened. See? She really loves Star Trek. You cannot miss that. And Wanda's always been like this, ever since she was a kid. I do remember that my sister was bedbound for a very long time. And at that time, the movable bed that she had, it had some steel tubes on the side. And she had a cast that would go from below her neck to covering the two legs. So to me, she was an astronaut in a spacecraft. And we would play many, many, many times like being astronauts. Wanda didn't have an easy childhood. She grew up in Gourabo, this small city just outside of Caguas in Puerto Rico. Her family didn't have a lot of money or education. Her sister was chronically ill. Wanda was diagnosed with diabetes when she was just 10. And even though she'd played astronaut, she never considered studying space until one day she was out fishing with her dad and she looked up. I remember clearly three beams of a meteor. One was reddish, the other ones were more towards the bluish side. And I remember that it lasted like less than a second. And I made this expression like, oh, you know, like to me that was like, oh, it has been like the greatest thing. And my father, he turned toward me and he said, those are rocks falling from the sky. And what he was telling me is that's not a spiritual thing. There is science behind it. Those are rocks falling from the sky. So at that moment, it's like, I need to learn more about those rocks. Where are they coming from? Wanda eventually went to college to study science. But by this point, her diabetes had gotten worse. And she was starting to lose her vision. No, there is a problem. And he said, if you cannot read, your grades will be very, very, very bad. Right. If you have no one reading to you, your grades will be worse. So I would intuitively guess answers. She thought about trying to study something else. But I didn't have the minimum GPA to transfer to another faculty. I had to stay in science and thinking, what am I going to do in the field of science? I cannot see. And I cannot change. And then I am blind and I have a disability. But also, I'm the only one that can work in my family. Her father had lost his job. Her sister was still sick. It was a lot of pressure for a 22-year-old. I cannot leave the university because it's going to be a major family situation. Wanda hadn't really come to terms with the fact that she was going blind. She kept hoping that one day she'd just wake up and suddenly be able to see again. So she didn't really talk about it. And she only had one friend who noticed. He was the only one who knew something was happening to me because I would see it and would not move unless I would perceive that no one else was in the hallway. Her friend, Emilio, happened to be the president of the astronomy club. And when he saw how much Wanda was struggling, he had an idea. He said, Wanda, I want you to come with me. And I want you to listen to what I have in my house. Emilio showed her this small antenna he had in the back of his house, basically just two hanging metal wires. He handed her a pair of headphones and she listened. It was noise, white noise, right? And then increases, right? And then it diminishes. It may have lasted about 30 seconds. And I said, Emilio, turn that off. It's horrible. But Emilio didn't turn it off. He kept playing it. This is a recording of the actual sound they were listening to, by the way. And finally, he told her what it was. He said, Wanda, I think that is a sunburst. It was a real time detection of a solar emission. Wanda was literally hearing the sun. And as luck would have it, she was tuning into one of the most powerful solar storms ever recorded. She was hearing the sun's outer atmosphere being blown off into space. And at that moment, everything transformed from me perceiving that those sounds were bothersome and ugly. It transformed into beauty. Even more, the sense of possibility, right? My world was closing up, bit by bit. Honestly speaking, at that very moment, I was dying. And that death sentence began to lift up. You have no idea. For the first time, I felt happiness in my life. It was like she was a kid again, coming face to face with the sky. And she realized she wouldn't have to give up on her dream. She could still study space. She'd just have to listen to it instead. When you listen to it, it's not a cold, not moving space. It's very, very active. It's full of dynamism. It's full of life. I'm Noam Hasenfeld, and this is the final episode of The Sound Barrier, a series from unexplainable about the limits of our senses and the ways we can break through. On today's episode, what are we missing when we just look out into space? And what can we learn if we listen? If you've only ever heard one thing about space and sound, it might be from the movie Alien. There's got to be a way of killing it. How? How do we do it? It was on the poster. It was in the trailers. You can't. In space, no one can hear you scream. It's a pretty great tagline, but it's also scientifically accurate. Sound, as we know it here on Earth, it needs air. It needs a means of propagation to be detected by an ear. Sound is a pressure wave. It's basically just a vibration, which means it needs something to move through. It could be air, it could be water, it could be the ground. So when someone is talking to you in a room, they're literally making the air vibrate, which makes your eardrum vibrate, which your brain hears as sound. But space is almost a complete vacuum, which is why it's pretty much silent. But there are other kinds of waves that can move through space. Visible light, X-rays, gamma rays, and some of them, like radio waves and microwaves, can be picked up by antennas and shifted down into our hearing range. You have an electronic device in the receiver that brings it into the frequency of human hearing. That's what Wanda was hearing in her friend's backyard. Radio waves, shooting out from the sun, picked up by the antenna, shifted down so she could listen. Wanda was so blown away by what she heard out there that she wanted to learn everything she could about listening to space. But she still had to deal with all the limitations of her life on Earth. Remember, I couldn't read the books. Screen readers were not available, so I was asking people sitting in the library, can you find on the computer these or that or whatsoever, and whatever search engine that was available would bring this information to us. But she learned that scientists had been listening to space for decades. Like the engineer who was able to listen to the center of the Milky Way, or the physicist who listened to plasma waves, these ripples through charged particles in space, or the scientist who used sound to help him make one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. I didn't realize at the time how big it was, but I do now. That's Robert Wilson, usually known as Bob. You spoke to him. Wanda was pretty pumped. Ahhhhhhh! Bob is extremely chill about the whole thing. We weren't even so impressed with cosmology. Bob's almost 90 now, and he hasn't stopped. He's a senior scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and he's one of the first names Wanda came across when she was diving into the history of listening to space. Because Bob and his partner used sound to help them find the first direct evidence of the Big Bang. And it happened by accident. Back in the 60s, Bob was pretty different. Well, I had hair. Still just as understated. And he was a young physicist working with his partner on a new antenna, trying to measure microwaves from outside the Milky Way. But when they went to make their first measurement, they noticed this problem. There was this booming signal. The antenna was twice as hot as it was supposed to be. When Bob put on his headphones, it sounded like some kind of static. If you had a television and you turned to an off channel, you would get a hiss. Yeah, like the snow? Yeah, same effect. We were very disappointed at that point and started thinking about what could be wrong. They kept listening to the sound to make sure it wasn't just noise from somewhere nearby, like the city. But no matter which direction they pointed the antenna, they still heard the hiss. So that couldn't be it. They thought it might be radiation from a nuclear weapons test. So they waited a few months, measured again, still had that hiss. Nothing had changed. They even thought it might be something, let's just say, closer to home. There was a pair of pigeons that lived in the antenna. There are pigeons that lived in the antenna? Yes. OK. We see them flying in and out. So we put a little bait in there, caught the pigeons. But none of that made any difference. So even after the pigeons were gone, you still heard the hiss? Right. Bob still wasn't anywhere close to thinking about the Big Bang. He was still thinking about those freaking pigeons. They had deposited pigeon dropping into the antenna. There was poop in the antenna? Well, they'd been living in there, what do you expect? OK. We just scrubbed it out. It wasn't a big deal. Bob didn't really spend too much time pondering the origins of the universe. He figured it had just always been there. The idea that it's the same now as it was before and will be the same in the future. That's what most people thought at that point. But there was this other idea that was starting to gain some traction. The Big Bang, that the universe started in this gigantic explosion. But Big Bang believers were still looking for their smell. Still looking for their smoking gun. The expectation was if the universe started out very hot and full of radiation, it would still be full of radiation. There would be something left over from the initial explosion, which one could detect. Bob started telling other scientists about the hiss. And when the Big Bang Brigade finally heard about it, they were like, Bob, you found it. That hiss, which is all over the place all the time and is definitely not pigeons. That's the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. When you found out that what you had been noticing for nine months could, I don't even know how to say this, like could be the answer to the origin of the universe. Like, what did you feel? I think we felt that, yes, that's a possibility. Maybe there's some other explanation. You just weren't that, you weren't that excited? Not terribly excited. We weren't quite ready to say that that's the only possibility. About a year later, after a bunch of follow-up research, Bob got a call from a reporter at the New York Times. And finally, he started to buy into the hype. The next morning, my father walked down to the local pharmacy and bought a New York Times. And there on the front page of the New York Times was a picture of the Anton and an article about this discovery. Written on top of that picture was the headline. Signals imply a Big Bang universe. By the time Wando was learning about Bob's story, the Big Bang had become something like the Big Bang astronomers. And really, lots of people just took for granted. Of course, the universe had a beginning. Of course, it was this really big explosion. But every fact that seems like bedrock truth once had a beginning, where it shifted from a wacky idea to something we all just accept. And for the Big Bang, that moment was when Bob and his partner noticed this signal. This is the actual sound they heard when they put on their headphones. A lot of it's just static from the instruments. But a good amount of it, like 10%, is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. It's the sound of the creation of the universe. Bob and his partner eventually won a Nobel Prize for their work. And they created a precedent for Wando to follow, that sound can play an essential role in some of the biggest scientific discoveries in history. So you can see why Wando would kind of freak out when I brought up Bob. No, I'm so moved that you spoke to Wilson. Well done. But Bob was only listening to a small slice of the universe, microwaves that were shifted into our hearing range. In a minute, Wando learns how to listen to everything else. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-acid portfolio of stocks, bonds, and options, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing, Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. member FINRA and SIPC, Advisory Service by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. 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A few years after Wanda started learning about listening to space, she found herself at NASA. She couldn't believe how she pulled it off, but she got an internship. That was a huge blessing because my grades were very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad. And she wasn't just planning to listen to that tiny slice of the universe, the radio waves, the microwaves. She wanted to hear the meteors she saw as a kid. So she started working on something called sonification. Sonification is bringing information into the audible domain in order to augment your perception. Sonification isn't what Wanda was doing when she heard that sunburst in her friend's backyard, or what Bob was doing when he heard that hiss left over from the Big Bang. They were directly listening to things like radio waves or microwaves that were shifted into the range of human hearing. But sonification is a way to translate any kind of data into sound. You can take things we can see like stars or galaxies, things we can't see like x-rays or infrared light, and you can translate them into something we can hear. It's kind of like a Geiger counter, those little handheld gadgets that tell you about radiation levels by playing a bunch of clicks. Those clicks aren't what radiation sounds like. They're just a translation of the data. They're a way for scientists to hear where the radiation is and how strong the radio waves are. And how strong it is. Audio will increase perception to things that are blind to the human eye. Sonifications don't need to sound like the Big Bang background fuzz or whooshing sunbursts. They can sound like anything, as long as they're clearly communicating the data. And it's often a lot easier to hear things than it is to see them. This is a sonification of a mouse walking. I love this example. Every sound you're hearing is a pair of paws hitting the ground. And now, here's a mouse that has a genetic mutation, which makes it wobble when it walks. If you wanted to find out exactly when its paws hit the ground, it would be pretty hard to tell just by looking at it, but it's obvious when you listen. So Wanda was curious if she could harness this potential for astronomers. She set up a test. I simulated a task that astronomers used for the detection of black holes. She gave scientists simulated data that looked like what happens when gas swirls around a black hole. There were graphs that showed where the radiation was strongest, and there were sounds that showed the same thing. Some examples were clear, other ones were trickier. And when astronomers used both the graphs and the sounds, they did better than when they just used one or the other. But audio was just about as good as a graph on its own, sometimes even better, which gave Wanda confidence that she could make new discoveries by listening to different parts of space, like the merger of two neutron stars, these ultra-dense remnants of exploded supernovas. Each hit you're listening to is a measurement of the energy given off by these two stars as they're orbiting each other. Louder hits, more energy, softer hits, less energy. And Wanda chose to use these high-pitched timpani hits for this sonification, so she could hear the tempo changes really clearly. If you hear the changes, the ups and downs are quite uniform, but then at the end there is an area where it seems the tempo is changing. It feels a little bit faster. Right there, there's a little hiccup in the tempo. And it's telling me about how the system is rotating. It's not as uniform as we think. She's even used sonification to find things no one had noticed before, like in a gamma ray burst, this huge explosion that happens when a star dies. The interior of the star collapses under its own weight, and it starts rotating ever faster. Like an ice skater when pulling their arms in close to their body. Wanda actually gave a TED talk about this gamma ray burst. She decided to zoom into a part of it that other people might have missed. This part that might have just been confused for noise in the data. And I want you to hear what I heard. You will hear it as a very fast decreasing volume. It's frogs at home. Don't pay attention. That's the fast decrease in volume she's talking about right there. It's really subtle. It's also kind of masked by a frog. But there's a moment where it gets softer. Here it is again. Wanda says she's the first person to notice it. These resonances have not been identified by anyone. They had the same kind of sound. But it's not as clear as it seems. These resonances had not been identified by anyone. They had not been discovered before. It's still kind of mysterious. And Wanda says there needs to be more research. But she thinks that tiny decrease in volume might offer new ways to understand these dying stars. And the way they give birth to matter. The elements that form the molecules that form the chemical building blocks of life are produced at the final stages of a star. Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. The stuff that makes us, us. The building blocks of life. They're made by stars and blown into space when they die. It was almost like Wanda was following in Bob's footsteps. Bob had heard evidence of the creation of the universe. And Wanda was hearing the first step in the creation of life. These days, Wanda is an award-winning astronomer who's worked at places like the Arasibo Observatory, the Smithsonian Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and she's been traveling around the world trying to tell everyone she knows about sonification. I actually had met Wanda at a couple events and was just fascinated by her work and the idea of translating information to sound. And that just set off an inspirational light bulb for me. That's Kim Arkand. She's a visualization scientist at NASA's Chandra Observatory, the biggest X-ray telescope in the world. X-ray data is inherently out of the human realm of vision, right? We cannot see anything besides visible light. And so having X-ray images only just seemed like it didn't really make much sense. Why not listen instead? Why are we not prioritizing other methods of experiencing the universe around us? And so moving into sonification just made sense. Kim decided to take some of her data and convert it into sound. Like, here's a sonification Kim made of what might be my favorite space photograph, the pillars of creation. You might have seen it before. It's these three towers where stars are created, made up of gas and dust. The sounds you're hearing are based on a combination of the Hubble photograph and X-ray data from Chandra. It's going to pan from left to right, and you're going to be hearing essentially a mapping of that data as we scan across it. The combination of the beeps and boops, if you will, of that X-ray information that's tracing all of those slightly older stars. And then you're also going to hear the sort of texture and structure of those tall pillars of gas and dust in the optical light. So this is the inner Milky Way and the supermassive black hole that's lurking at the core. This is another sonification Kim made. It's the Galactic Center. She combined images from three different telescopes, taken in three types of light. There's an image in infrared light, which is below what we can see. There's visible light from the Hubble. And there's an image in X-ray light, which is above what we can see. And if you want to listen to this sonification with the visuals, we've got a link in the show notes where you can see it, so please check that out. But yeah, Kim decided to use different instruments to clearly differentiate between the three kinds of light. So in this case, the sound that we assigned was the piano to the lowest energy from infrared light. Lucky violin for the mid-range from Hubble. And then the highest energy is the Glockenspiel. And the Glockenspiel was the X-ray? That is the X-ray light. So you could hopefully hear that little crescendo at the end. That is our supermassive black hole. So it's really singing in X-ray light, which is, again, very useful. This is an image that I had created with some colleagues. And I was so familiar with it, right? So familiar. But the first time I ever heard this piece all the way through, I really had to take a moment because it changed how I thought of this dataset. I was like, what is happening over there? Like, what is that over there? I never noticed. This is so strong there. How did I not notice that? Listening to data like this, it allows you to hear changes in everything from pitch to volume to timbre to rhythm. And you can hear them all at the same time. Listening allows you to pick out one sound to focus on over background noise, like listening to someone you're talking to in a noisy room. And maybe, most importantly, it forces you to slow down. When I'm looking at a dataset that's an image, I'm looking at all of the data at one time. There's a lot of information for your eye to parse at any particular moment. But if I am listening to data of one of those same objects that I'm used to looking at, I am getting the information over time. And it just, for me at least, allows me to think through what it is I'm listening to in a very different way. But I want to go one step further here. It's easy to think of astronomy as this fundamentally visual thing. This pure idea of just gazing up at the stars. And if I'm being honest, that's how I felt before I started working on this story. I felt like audio was a nice complement to an image. A way to double check it, maybe a way to get a fresh take on something you've seen a hundred times before, but still secondary. It makes sense. It makes total sense seeing as believing as a phrase for a reason, right? But so much data from these telescopes is essentially all invisible to us. We are not able to capture it with human vision. So it has to undergo a process of transformation just to get to an image. Even when we're not using infrared light or X-ray light, images often aren't what they seem. Like that famous photo of the Pillars of Creation, the Pillars aren't actually that red. The red's just a way to tell us there's sulfur there. The greens and blues are just a way to let us know there's hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. If you were traveling in a spaceship by the Pillars, it would look totally different. A lot of the structure that we're able to see in the Pillars is existing in non-visible kinds of light, which you wouldn't be able to see any of it. So what are the real Pillars of Creation? Is it that famous photo with the reds and greens? Is it a newer infrared photo where there's so many stars that the Pillars are almost see-through? Or is Kim's sonification just as real? To me, sonification is a natural extension of the data, because you're just moving it from one form of authentic data to another, right? There's no lack of validity or authenticity because we are moving it from a visual to a sound. I've been coming back to this idea over and over again since I started working on this series. By this point, we've spent four episodes talking about how much of the world we hear is constructed by our brain. But it's not just sound. It's all our senses. I think Dan Polly, the tinnitus researcher I talked to, put it pretty well. Because the brain doesn't have direct contact with the physical world, everything that we perceive as consciousness is constructed from the activity of the brain. Sonification is a reminder that no matter what sense we use, we're still going to have blind spots. No representation of reality is more valid or real than any other one. I've had multiple people who are blind or low vision approach us and say, I didn't think I could even do astronomy because it's so visual. Sonification of these types of objects has shown me that I might be welcomed working for NASA, working at an observatory. I had a group of 13 students this summer. And I remember they said, I never thought I would be able to do it. It was by listening to the data that I realized that I can continue forward. Wanda is still pushing sonification even further. She's working with the Royal Academy of Science International Trust to launch an institute for multisensory science in Lisbon this January. And she isn't just excited about accessibility. She's excited about how scientists want to sonify 20,000 galaxies in order to look for patterns they might have missed. How they're analyzing gravitational waves from merging black holes. How they've even proposed using sonification as a new way to search for dark matter. It's exciting to have more people with different skills contributing to the mainstream, studying things that we never thought existed before. As I was talking to Wanda, I started thinking back to the very first episode we did on this show about Vera Rubin, the scientist who discovered dark matter. How people ignored her because she was a woman. How she was kept out of scientific institutions. How somehow she never received a Nobel Prize. There were so many moments when she could have just stopped. And if that had happened, who knows? Maybe we'd still have no idea that most of the universe is missing. How many other scientific ideas are we leaving undiscovered? Because we're making it too hard for different kinds of people with all kinds of perspectives and sensory biases to do science. What might happen if we made it easier? People that are not like the current workforce in physics, astronomy, mathematics, the sciences, they will be transformed from beneficiaries to benefactors and to agents of change. If we bring more skills to science, we will have to delete the word limit. The emergence of science would be incredible. This was the final episode of our series, The Sound Barrier. It was reported and produced by me, Noam Hasenfeld. I also wrote the music. Editing by Joanna Salotaroff. Mixing and sound design from Chris Gianniala. The best kinds of explosions from Sally Helm. And really nuanced, detailed fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Melissa checked so many facts for this series and just made all of it so much better. Melissa, you are amazing. Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are editorial directors. And Bird Pinkerton surveyed the scene in front of her. Hundreds of traitorous platypuses cowering while their former octopus allies stood over them, preventing them from moving. But the birds had abandoned them. And Aaron Bird had vanished. Thanks to Vartika Sharma and Paige Vickers for the beautiful artwork for The Sound Barrier series. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Bird. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It really helps us out. And if you're into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week. And as I said, it's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it Com-Pliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to V-A-N-T-A dot com slash com. Support for this show comes from Indeed. If you're looking to hire top tier talent with expertise in your field, Indeed says they can help. Indeed Sponsored Jobs gives your job the best chance at standing out and grants you access to quality candidates who can drive the results you need. Spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results, now with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash Fox Business. 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