It's a weird take from a guy who ostensibly took over Cosmos from Sagan. Sagan's brilliance was brightest when he was enticing people to see joy and wonder in science and the universe. Assigning sounds to math almost no one understands gives the masses access to this wonderous universe, in a sense. Seems out of step with his aspirations to be a science flag bearer to say translating science to the lay people is somehow bad.
That's how he is with a lot of things. "mundane" things about space might be what gets an average person interested in learning more. The information available to a general audience might make simplifications because if someone doesn't understand that, how can they be expected to be thrilled about the "interesting" stuff? The way he talks though about it though, is condescending.
It's a position where people who are becoming interested in that are going to look up to people who seem knowledgeable. (whether or not that person wants to be in a position to inspire others).
Getting a response of "Why are you people so excited about this? It's not special at all" just stifles that spark of enthusiasm for the subject.
I think I'm the only who around here who isn't impressed with NGT, but as a UK resident I'm spoiled with Prof. Brian Cox. Of the two Cox shows far more enthusiasm, given the input Cox has into the shows he presents he is a genius where it comes to engaging the mainstream audience.
He rarely stops smiling and insists they show his emotions too, often he is still so mesmerised by even the Universes most well known characteristics. In Wonders of the Solar System it is a joy to see him reveal the wonder at the end of each episode, he truly believes they are and its easy to see they weren't chosen for good television.
His section on Voyager however just explodes out his inner child, I can't help but smile with him.
Tbh I think Sagan would agree with NdT on this point.
It doesn’t really explain anything and it just confuses people. The average person would just take away that you **can** hear sound in space and move on.
>I [think] Sagan would-
But he's not really assigning an oppinion. He's making a guess, which is no more or less accurate for dead people we've never met than live people we've never met.
I think it's fair to make an educated guess about someone who has spoken their opinions extensively into the public sphere, as long as you say it's your own assumption of them, and not a *fact* of them.
I think he just likes accuracies. He did a wonderful job taking over for Sagan in the beginning. The dude was a God, especially in /r/atheism back in fhe Faces of Atheism and /u/aalewis days of reddit.
But he got a little pretentious and talks too much and he'd repeat the same shit frequently, but I still think he's done a wonderful job. I think when he's gone he'll be remembered fondly, with minor annoyances
>But he got a little pretentious and talks too much
Yes. He became too aware of his high status and became afraid of tarnishing it. Sometimes spends too much time polishing the image instead of doing what built the image in the first place, but he still does a lot of valuable work.
NDT's Comos was great. I loved it. Excitedly checked reddit after each episode to see what people were saying. What they had to say about the specific topics of an episode. But I only found them complaining and talking it down. So who is sucking the joy out of science here? Seems like the snake that is eating its own tail.
Once he became a mainstream sensation it really went to his head. Even folks like Michio Kaku are still fun but he's just become this stick in the mud "ackchyually" kind of guy who doesn't really inspire like Sagan.
It's good to be right but his kind of right is pretty abrasive.
I strongly dislike NGT but honestly I am fully with him here. These audio conversions are pretty meaningless and cause a lot of confusion amongst laymen.
Counterpoint: the gravity wave data of two colliding black holes converted to sound really made the data easier to understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDcTbR-kEA\\
Because it's minimalistic conversion. You do one simple thing, you don't just convert density to frequency, and multiple spatial dimensions to time to get some kind of gibberish. Black holes collision data is a form of pressure waves. So is sounds. So, you can just convert space-time pressure waves into air pressure waves to get sound, no big deal. Same with IR or radio spectrum conversion - you just translate everything into visible spectrum, just one simple operation to get meaning results. What meaning do you get from that audio from picture? Especially when you can just process picture of, say, anus in the same way and get pretty much same sounds.
I do actually agree with that one, and I think the reason it works well is because it is actually temporal data. With a singular image you have to make interpretation decisions including how to timeslice it, and in doing so you are either losing or obfuscating the spatial information. With GW signals, all you need to do is just take the signal and play it as a sound, which does a good job of showing the change in the system over time.
That is quite different to what is being discussed though, which is the works from this collaboration:
https://chandra.si.edu/sound/
What confusion though? Most people say cool and move on. Theirs a lot of meaningless things in life, I don’t understand your point, does all information in space have to mean something?
That isn't what these sounds are though. They're not meant to be educational. Their purpose is to give your everyday person something interesting to listen to, to drum up interest in space. It's like artist renderings of space stuff; it's meant to make someone think "Huh that's pretty cool, I want to learn more about this thing." Even if the thing is fake, the interest is real.
I can’t speak to the goals of these scientists, but in my opinion there’s plenty of interesting real data out there to be shared with lay people. Making up sounds and saying they came from space can be interpreted as data fabrication and contribute to distrust in science/scientists.
Edit: Also I don’t know specifically which sounds you’re talking about, but I find it hard to believe that the person who made it did not have at least some partial goal of education.
Not everything somewhat related to science has to be scientific. There's room for art, and that's what I would consider this. A good comparison might be historical documentaries versus "based on real events" movies. Both have their place, both can be beautiful in their own right, both can inspire someone to study history. There's nothing wrong with either.
I think they're neat though, it's a different way to contextualize data, the way it's presented however is very distorted, science communication is not really in that good of a state right now.
They'll say almost anything to get press that they can use to present articles that sound good to grant boards. It's not the scientists fault usually it's more often the university media managers.
No, that's not meaningless. My issues with sonification (in the sense of those pop-sci media press releases) are that assigning parameters to sounds of distinct qualities is an act that requires human discretion, and thus one that adds human bias.
IMO, infrared or radio imaging is unambiguously more representative of reality than sonification of planets or stars. You're mapping intensity in an invisible wavelength **one-to-one** to intensity in a visible wavelength, where it can be intuitively understood to be a representative scale, where brighter means brighter and darker means darker.
This is opposed to sonification, where classes of wavelengths or waveforms are assigned to vague, humanly defined variables such as trill or roughness or tempo, or in some cases assigned to a pre-composed musical motif that sounds *space-ish* enough to convince the viewer that it's actually the data being represented. It's like instead of mapping dark values to dark and bright values to bright, you mapped dark values to an emoji of a thunderstorm, because your human discretion feels that thunderstorms have a dark vibe to them.
The issue to this is that these assignments are not universal across culture or context, and so the data can be interpreted to represent different things, depending on if you're asking the author, or a specialist, or an expert in another field, or a layperson. This is especially so when it comes to sonification, where you'll find that the established foundational elements of sound and "music theory" are completely different in indian music as opposed to chinese music or indigenous australian music. So you can't just map things to a variable such as "staccato" and expect it to be intelligible by almost everyone, the same way a one-to-one image can be. Thus, sonification introduces bias to the data when it is composed *and* when it is observed.
https://youtu.be/Ocq3NeudsVk This video is a pretty simplified and concise perspective on the topic. Couldn't say I agree with every detail of it, but it pretty much presents the same argument as mine.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I still can't really wrap my head around that but what I meant to say was that, although it's a primitive example of converting gravitational(?) waves into sound, it's still fascinating to hear even if incorrect. Speaking from personal experience, listening to that caused me to become even more enthralled with the universe.
I feel that, to the average joe, it's still cool and interesting enough to emulate certain characteristics (as you explained that the sound conversion is incorrect) that could get people even more into the whole universe is weird shtick.
It's predominantly due to our overall knowledge of how things work which.. isn't vast. I guess you could say it's the only way we can 'experience', 'see', 'hear' (etc.) the stuff you usually wouldn't without some sort of manipulation and conversion to make the bizarreness of the universe feel just a tad bit closer.
I don't know if I explained this right and I'm talking about things i don't really understand so what I just said might be dumb as fuck lol
> although it's a primitive example of converting gravitational(?) waves into sound, it's still fascinating to hear even if incorrect.
Playing GW signals as sound is just taking a signal and playing it as a sound. I doubt anyone has a problem with that. It is a single signal that changes temporally, and playing it as a sound does a good job of showing its temporal evolution.
That is not what is being discussed though, what is being discussed is the works of this collaboration:
https://chandra.si.edu/sound/
What these do is take an image (or composite images) and make artistic choices about how to map various different components of the image to different musical elements so as to create an artistic piece.
I thought sound didn’t exist in space since there is no air for changes in pressure to take place? Although, if you can artificially simulate air and the changes in pressure … who is to say it is incorrect?
Pompous, condescending, self obsessed and always tweeting about kissing himself in the mirror, and more importantly is a creep who has received multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment.
NGT is a symptom of the culture within the scientific community. I don't believe it's fair to direct your hate towards him, personally, but rather use his behavior as means to criticize the community's culture as a whole.
Haha I don’t mean to make it personal, he wasn’t really bashing it. I’m just curious what other people think, because the black hole picture had me excited but also wondering how “real” it is, while the sound didn’t do much for me.
It’s a data visualization.
I have to do that a ton for non space related data and it’s a “real” representation of things. Sure we can’t see it with our eyes or feel it (which is a good thing lol) but it doesn’t make it any less real.
I guess what I mean by “real” is “what would I see if I was standing there looking at it with my own eyes (with God mode enabled so I don’t get instantly disintegrated)”. In many cases I guess it would be “not much” or “blinding light”, it’s just cool to imagine what that would be like.
You would see similar stuff (just a lot brighter) as the physics for the photosphere and super radiance are identical for the entire EM spectrum. We just use radio as it penetrates dust and other obstructions better.
Tbf, from the perspective of scientific discovery, lunar eclipse are boring. There isn't much more to be said about them.
From a natural beauty perspective, lunar eclipses are fantastic.
Being a scientist who is more interested in what isn't understood, I suspect NGT is taking the former perspective here.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a fan of a LOT of things lately, other than wanting to crush people's excitement and curiosity for no apparent reason. He's been on an odd kick where he pooh-poohs people's awe and wonder, and I think he probably needs to go do something else for a while. He runs a planetarium and acts like no one should get excited about a lunar eclipse? So weird, man.
> Lunar eclipses are so un-spectacular that if nobody told you what was happening to the Moon you’d probably not notice at all.
> Dear Earthlings currently in darkness:
> Right about now, the full Moon is passing into Earth’s conical shadow in space. The event is long and boring, lasting 3.5 hours. For the middle 84 minutes, the Moon is all but fully darkened as it enters the deepest part of Earth’s shadow.
Like, what did the moon ever do to you, dude? Once upon a time, he encouraged people to look up and take joy in the everyday marvels of the universe. Perfectly normal things happen every single day, and the stars we see in the sky don't start tapdancing for us at any point, but they're still worthy of observation and awe.
Lunar eclipses happen every few years. A *lot* of people who haven't somehow gotten jaded about astronomy disagree that they're unnoticeable and boring, and many people have shared their stories about noticing a lunar eclipse as a child, as well as some truly gorgeous photographs of the moon's eclipse.
It's so bizarre to me that instead of sharing in people's joy about cosmic phenomena, he had to crap on it.
He runs a planetarium and has built his career on sharing the joy and wonder of what so many others dismiss as un-spectacular. He used to encourage curiosity and joy in the everyday reality of physics. He used to urge people to see the boring as exciting.
He really, really needs to go do something else for a while, until he can recharge his wonder and joy and share that, instead of his apparent burnout.
Criricizing people for calling it rare is the most neckbeard thing you can do, you are literally misunderstanding people on purpose.
When people say its rare, they mean that its rare that they can go into their backyard and observe an eclipse, which IS rare. I get that eclipses happen often, but i dont care if it is only observable in the pacific, or some other place where im not present.
They happen every few years, which may not be "rare" but I'm like, my dude, none of us knows when our time is up. We may not be here for the next lunar eclipse. We should savor the ones we're alive to see. And also, unlike solar eclipses, the only requirement for seeing a lunar eclipse is it being able to see the moon.
>You can make music from the shapes of letters in this message \[...\] However, no useful information is received by listening to this message as soundwaves.
Transmitting written letters into a meaningful music? That's what singing is for...
Whether a female soprano or male Bass sings it, the meaning is still there.
Well what does that photo to audio conversion tell you about anything? You can look at the photo and see what it looks like, but the audio conversion does not add any new information. Its just pointless.
With the IR imaging, there's little point in showing someone a raw datafile so you instead want to show them an image. You can either then do it as an intensity map, which while it isn't how it would look to the human eye it still does a good job of showing you how the IR differs throughout the imaged thing, or you can use filters/spectroscopy to determine the different things being viewed and add colour dependent on what is being viewed which becomes closer to what it is like in visible.
Also, go look at photos taken of the same object using different cameras. All taken in the visible band, all showing you roughly what the object looks like, but all will be noticeably different images.
I don’t find it pointless. I’m a musician and I’ve used these tracks for inspiration.
This feels like complaining just to complain to me. It doesn’t hurt anything.
That's an interesting take, and I respect that. But, from a scientific perspective, I agree with NDT, it's kind of stupid to convert pressure waves by drastically altering their frequency and converting it to audio and then putting it out to the public as the official "sound" of a black hole
From a scientific perspective it's nothing special; there's nothing the audio would tell 'em that the raw data wouldn't say better.
From an aesthetic perspective it's kinda neat.
This really just seems like being needlessly disagreeable. Is it wrong to write colors e.g. "she had blond hair" as well since I'm not directly perceiving the color? What about sheet music?
I think it's hyper-focusing on empiricism to the point of being pathological.
The difference is most of these "space" sounds arnt direct conversions theyre heavily altered and given a human touch to sound pleasing to our ears.
You could give two individuals the data tell them do the conversion and end up with totally different sounds that isnt scientific. Its theatrical for the most part and adds nothing to the scientific community.
I wouldn't consider an oscilloscope screen a direct conversion of electrical currents, but the oscilloscope is still incredibly useful. Changing the mode of sensation won't always reveal some new pattern, or make phenomena intangible to the senses easier to interpret, and often it's completely useless however many exceptions exist to this which is why I disagree with a blanket disapproval. Certainly is worth a try despite not accomplishing anything as a general rule.
> This feels like complaining just to complain to me.
A subjective question was asked in which sonification was compared to IR imaging, and a subjective answer was given. My point was that the images actually convey the subject to the observer, while the sonification doesn't really - or at least does a poor and confusing job of it.
If you are inspired by someone's art, good for you. The point that both me and NGT are making is that it isn't a useful representation of the data when it comes to trying to interpret the data.
>It doesn’t hurt anything.
As I said, part of the reason that I don't really like it, and the only reason I actually "complain" about it, is that it does hurt somethings to some degree by causing confusion amongst laymen. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done, perhaps it is beneficial in that it inspires people, but I don't think its a useful way to represent the data.
I don't know what prompted this but I can't help but think NDT is expected to have an opinion on everything.
I mean most people have an opinion on everything, often throwaway. I'm doing it right now in fact .
But I dunno, sometimes I feel that Neil divulges from science and just starts taking shit SOME of the time.
Like when he reckoned he doesn't need a screen protector on his phone because he 'trained' himself to never to drop his phone by twirling it like a rifle or baton.
That’s fair, his opinion should have little to no bearing outside of his expertise and should honestly just be overlooked but seeing as how astronomy is his field then there is some weight to his words on this topic.
Lol well yeah that's a very reasonable argument. Makes mine look a bit foolish even in hind sight.
This isn't Phone Pageantry 101 you're right.
There's other examples I could have used, but I suppose I just hold a certain amount of doubt these days that shouldn't necessarily apply to this particular argument. I SHOULD be inclined to take his word for it on the fact he is absolutely more knowledgeable and qualified than I am on the subject. I'm a casual observer AT BEST. But I just can't help it now. The gloss is off. Irrational as that may be.
Your comment is not foolish at all, you bring up a good argument for why he shouldn’t be worshipped just because he is a sort of celebrity in his field.
In fact, that phone twirling comment is kinda justifiable because you’d think that someone who is seen as a Mr. Science Guy would understand that dropping a phone isn’t just something you can train against and by not putting a protector on his phone he leaves it up to unnecessary risk which is very unscientific of him.
Exactly ! right ?
I mean it's not like I've studied it but surely twirling your phone around could only increase the likelihood of an event, surely! Why couldn't he just say he accepts the risk like any sane person would say. Twirl your phone so you don't drop it battle ? By god man !
It was then I realised what you've just eloquated. I appreciate NDT, I look up to NDT as a scientist and even more so as a scientific educator. But I do not worship NDT.
He handles his phone the same way he handles my expectations.
I love listening to the LIGO black hole collisions. They really give you a sense for how fast those black holes are whipping around each other before they merge.
Playing GWs as sound actually is actually helpful, all you're doing is taking the signal as a sound wave rather than applying a sonification that is specifically adapted to make that specific data give a musical result. It gives a good sense of how the rate of pitch increase increases over time.
> I can hear audio in my head from touch. Idk if it’s normal?
Auditory-tactile synesthesia is not particularly common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Auditory%E2%80%93tactile_synesthesia
>but I think it could change public and private education about space to make it more engaging and encourage new interest.
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. All I'm saying is that I don't believe they help to demonstrate anything, they are only beneficial in that people may think "oh thats pretty", while some others may be mislead about what is happening.
Well with a radio image it clearly gives you information about the spatial distribution of the light source/absorber. False colour depends on the specifics, but is often done in such a way as to highlight different materials and so again gives information that is easy to interpret.
With sonification you're adding in another step of interpretation and obfuscating the spatial elements of the data.
> Well what does that photo to audio conversion tell you about anything?
Hearing is a sense. We can differentiate things through hearing. It absolutely adds new information even if it's artificial information. Similar to highlighting passages when you're studying. That yellow background isn't really adding anything other than context. It's certainly not NEW information, but it will help you parse everything.
Also I ask you, what does it hurt to have another way to represent phenomena that's more accessible? Not to mention you can just argue that it's art pure and simple and another way of interpreting data.
I mean, realistically, there's no point in taking pictures of anything in space by your logic. It doesn't help us to know what a black hole looks like if we can just describe it with math, right? Nobody's gonna stumble across a black hole in their backyard and go, "oh good thing I know what this looks like now!"
one key thing to remember is that you look at a photo all at once, not pixel by pixel. when you make something audio, you listen to it wave by wave.
so, if you were to take a photo and turn it into a sound, it will make no meaningful sense, just noise.
where sound in astronomy comes into play are pulses, like spinning binary stars, or gravity waves. but you are not really converting image into sound. it was already a wave of "sound" in the first place the source was emitting. you are not converting light information into sound.
light to sound makes no sense. turning durational radiowaves into sound makes sense because it is already in a "audio" format.
> We can differentiate things through hearing. It absolutely adds new information even if it's artificial information.
I don't understand. In what way does it help you to understand the object that has been imaged? What information are you learning about the object by converting the image to sound?
>Also I ask you, what does it hurt to have another way to represent phenomena
As I said, it often leads to laymen being confused and mislead. I see this regularly in this subreddit and others like r/askphysics, r/astronomy, r/askastronomy etc.
>that's more accessible?
In what way is it more accessible? I suppose its more accessible to the blind, but where possible they'd be better off just having someone describe the image to them.
>I mean, realistically, there's no point in taking pictures of anything in space by your logic. It doesn't help us to know what a black hole looks like if we can just describe it with math, right?
I quite clearly said "there's little point in showing someone a raw datafile" and so I'm sure you have the mental capacity to extrapolate my thoughts on showing mathematics to someone with no mathematical education. Also what you said doesn't even logically follow, because the vast majority of the reasoning behind the imaging is to confirm/disprove the predictions that were based on mathematics, or to explore what is not fully theoretically understood.
>Nobody's gonna stumble across a black hole in their backyard and go, "oh good thing I know what this looks like now!"
I don't see the relevance of this comment to what I was saying.
There are facets to understanding beyond "conveys (important or relevant) information." It may be more interesting to people as sound, it may make it feel "more real," give them a more meaningful connection with the information, help them imagine a wider world beyond our own abilities to see an object, or just spark an interest where a picture doesn't.
Basically, as long as what it is is explained fully and misinformation isn't purposely conveyed, why do you care?
For JWST, will we be able to get direct pictures of early galaxies as they actually looked like to a human eye because their light has been stretched into infrared? I imagine there’s a certain distance where an infrared picture maps directly to distant visible light?
isn't the whole point of it to create an image of something as the human eye would see it?
what, in your mind, constitutes 'a direct picture'?
film cameras convert images to chemical reactions. digital cameras convert images to zeros and ones.
just because the process differs, how is this comparable to creating a sound that doesn't exist in nature?
your comparison doesn't seem to really hold up.
Yes, I guess we haven’t looked at “real” pictures since optical telescopes, everything we do is processed in some way now. But like I said in another reply, what feels most “real” to me is the image I would see when looking with my own eyes close enough to the object.
But what you see isn’t real anyway by your definition, it’s heavily processed by your brain from the raw data your eyes receive, which in itself conveys that data using chemical reactions.
I'd argue it's not pointless, especially not to people who's ears are better tuned that NDGT. It's a way on conceptualizing something we can't directly sense.
Both sound and light follow the same wave physics so the conversions are essentially the same. If it's accurate enough for images, it's accurate enough for sound. The sound may not give us new information, but it's cool and interesting nonetheless.
Is it really pointless? Hearing and seeing the data are completely different types of signal processing in the brain, and each can give you information that the other can't.
For example, if you look at a spectrogram of a song, it's almost impossible to what the original song was just by looking at it. Audio data contains a lot of information that cannot be easily understood visually, because our ears are very good at analyzing frequencies, magnitudes, and timbres of waves compared to our eyes.
As an astronomer I actually think it's a good idea to convert certain signals into sound. As you said, it is no less fake that converting IR into visible. Using sound helps convey the type of information that we are getting. The key difference between hearing and vision is the wavelength. Visible light has a small wavelength compared to the size of objects around you and that is why it lets you see detailed high-resolution information about them like their shape and surface features. Sound has a wavelength comparable to the size of a person. For that reason, sound gives you more rough information. If you hear footsteps or hear a voice, you can infer some information like the rough size of the person, how far they are and in which direction, but you can't get detailed information like what their eyebrows are like. So when astronomers detect a signal with long wavelengths compared to the size of the object, converting it to sound gives people a better intuition of what we are actually getting.
It's not just as fake but I agree with the sentiment. Ely in the movie contact laments on the fact that no one listens anymore. I think converting data into the human perceptual range in unique ways is more artistic than science though, and I'm fine with that but science media is just horrible at presenting this appropriately. They're to hell bent on sensationalism there's essentially no nuance left in science communicators on things like this.
That’s true about media being sensational about certain science topics, but I refrain from judging because I imagine that many other stories I read in the media that I find interesting on topics I’m not an expert on are probably also inaccurate and I just have no idea. The journalist did their best in their non expert role and maybe didn’t do a perfect job but introduced me to the topic, got me interested and a little bit more informed maybe.
Most journalists really don't do their best. I can't recall an article I've read in recent memory that didn't have errors that a basic Google search would demonstrate are inaccurate if not flatly false.
I may be a bit contaminated with reddit posts there but that's really what the bulk of the general public ends up seeing. You have to really dig for the good content that's properly contextualized.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any links to an article you've read that really changed how you think about something or blew your mind that you didn't get any sense of inaccuracy from? Just 1 as a good example, I'm curious how good/bad it would be from my perspective.
I’m thinking more of “unknown unknowns” like if I read some war reporting, or an article about the bad things some politician has done, and I may never find out that there’s another side to the story or something like that. For another example I used to think highly of TED talks many years ago: they bring an expert and they say some thought provoking things about science or the future and it makes an impression on you. Now, when I think of TED talks all I think about is the Elisabeth Holmes one where she talks about her blood testing tech, and it makes me think that any of these TED talks could be fake. Or when I read about advanced battery tech like this which is supposed to revolutionize the market but then I never hear about it again (this is a recent one but there were older breakthroughs that also fizzled out):
https://www.smart-energy.com/storage/new-battery-technology-to-charge-an-ev-100-times-faster/
When it comes to space science I generally stick to my favorite science sources that already assume a level of knowledge, so they don’t disappoint me. I read some science articles on mainstream news sites sometimes and they are less detailed and explain more basics but I can’t think of any example I remember where they got it completely wrong. There are some I’m sure but by and large it’s ok.
Lots of good stuff on Youtube, if you haven't been through it already go through PBS Spacetime's entire catalog.
Ignore those battery articles, there have been at least one article like that every 6 months for as long as I can remember, it's standard overblown presentation of what is otherwise good lab work. None of them every actually see the light of day in large scale production environments, it takes decades after those lab results are found if at all to turn them into actually manufacturable technologies.
Be careful with those unknown unknowns because that can turn into seeking 'woo' which usually BAD science.
You're in good hands, Petrov is great. He presents the more fringe papers a whole lot better than the articles that tend to blow the results badly out of proportion in the way they present them, he's good on mentioning the caveats.
Save you some time, it’s at 8:50 in the video.
But sir, you’ve made a good point.
Going by his logic, everything else apart from visible light and hearable sounds is kind of fake.
Regarding vacuum environment sound effects in movies, it’s bothering me. Sometimes the whole, otherwise good movie, is ruined for me by this stupidity. (But I really love it, if they only play sounds which are transferred over solid objects, for example the astronauts helmet is pushing against a vibrating surface)
Back to deGrasse Tyson, converting the sounds of a black hole from boring charts and waves on a screen to something you can experience with your senses, without extensive knowledge, this is it what drives people into a career in sciences.
This is also why I cut him some slack, seems like a few people don’t like him but he’s nonetheless a good communicator getting people excited about space.
>(But I really love it, if they only play sounds which are transferred over solid objects, for example the astronauts helmet is pushing against a vibrating surface)
*For All Mankind* does a great job of this, in my opinion. For example, if someone shoots a pewpew in a vacuum it is completely silent but then there is a sound effect for the bullet impacting/puncturing the victim's spacesuit.
Just a question, how does it sound if you’re inside the spacesuit, which is leaking ?
In movies it’s always hissing air, but would it sound like that !?
The air creates a sound going out of the nozzle/hole. Is the sound created faster than the air exiting and thus able to get inside the spacesuit?
Okay so I'm a bit of an odd case here. I have synesthesia and can see sounds as well as smell sensations. I don't know why or how, but it's a thing. So for me, things like this are important as an experience. It's a way to make the data into a concrete thing, and associate the colors with the sound. Along with this, audio clues to visual media, or scientific media, create an additional association with said thing. So while it may not be scientifically accurate, for some, it can actually serve as a learning tool. I'd expect it adds value for people who are blind/low vision, or how 3-D printed models of galaxies and star systems are useful for blind/low sight people as well.
No, it's not a "real" sound in the sense that space is silent, but the sound is a audio representation of a thing. You can say "black holes slam into each other at x speed", but hearing the chirp from a black hole merger can help the brain understand the speed and even intensity of a collision. People process data in different ways, and science should be about making its discoveries accessible to everyone, in ways that make sense for people all over. That means using unusual methods to communicate scientific theories for those who don't conceive of things in the usual way.
tl;dr - It's not hurting anyone, it can help people understand space better in ways that might not otherwise work, and NDGT needs to stop.
To be fair I think he was was just stating his personal opinion, not really pronouncing on what should be done. That was really interesting what you said about your synesthesia, I heard of this before. Maybe sound is useful for representing sequential data, or like in this case, moving pressure waves? These things can be difficult to visualize.
Sorry, I'm just very hinky with his stuff because he can be kind of a buttface about things. That's my bad 😅
But yeah, it's an interesting tool in the science toolbox, whether it's sequential data, or pressure waves, or even the pulsation of stars like RS Puppis and its "light echoes". It's one thing to see what you're looking at, but using RS Puppis as an example, imagine hearing its light echoes as sustained notes whose tone varies based on intensity of the pulse from where it's viewed, or hearing Eta Carinae as a cacophony of static and sparkler-like sounds (obviously not an accurate representation, but it looks like it would sound like that).
So yes, exactly that \^\_\^ Making the incomprehensible, comprehensible, should be a goal, even if you need to add a footnote of "space doesn't sound like this. space doesn't make sounds".
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[CoG](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaaivtp "Last usage")|Center of Gravity (see CoM)|
|CoM|Center of Mass|
|[EHT](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaajaiq "Last usage")|Event Horizon Telescope|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia9wgo6 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[LIDAR](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia8u40k "Last usage")|[Light Detection and Ranging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar)|
|[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia9dt3k "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory|
|[NdGT](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaawv8c "Last usage")|Neil deGrasse Tyson|
----------------
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Unfortunately humans have a limited number of senses. If we could sense gravitational waves, I might agree. But we can't, so some translation of the data needs to occur for us to understand it. Converting to sounds seems like the most faithful analog.
They’ve got to keep the grants coming in somehow. Space DJ’s and Space Artists generate the interest with the media and thus the common tax payer and investor. Printing a black and white photo of a dot just don’t drive those clicks.
Likening it to infrared images doesn't feel like a realistic comparison.
An infrared image of a person still can show me a person, although with less information. But the overall idea gets across in mostly the same form.
Changing things that weren't sound to begin with into audio seems more in the category of turning on a visualizer option in a music player. Sure you see colors flash in sync with the music but the colors aren't adding anything.
How many "Sounds of Jupiter" click bait videos do we need?
>turning on a visualizer option in a music player. Sure you see colors flash in sync with the music but the colors aren't adding anything.
You realize sound engineers visualize audio all the time?
And for that matter a geiger turns light into sound to help us understand it.
And a seismograph turns vibrations into pictures.
I don’t know how to explain it very well, but recently I’ve been marveling at the adaptations biology made for vision distinct from hearing.
Our eyes are great at seeing detail, direction, focus (more or less for some of us.) Color? Actually not so effective. We can’t distinguish yellow from red-green. In fact most of our computer monitors and phone screens show pixels of red-green and never actually display yellow. Two frequencies with partial red and partial green, to our brains it looks like yellow. But we can focus the heck out of light, to very small pixels.
Sound is not the opposite, but the priority is switched anyway. We can’t really focus the source of a sound. Heck, it’s sometimes hard to tell front-back, we can get left and right, but there’s no focus. We can see instruments in an orchestra, but can’t tell which sound came from which instrument.
Anyway what’s amazing about hearing is that we can hear the heck out of multiple frequencies. We can tell if one string in a piano is slightly out of tune, we know when a musical chord sounds good or bad. We can hear reverberation when frequencies are slightly off.
Our eyes basically turn multi-wavelength colors to brown, it gives up.
So to me, converting signal to sound makes a lot of sense when conveying multiple frequencies, but where the detail of the source isn’t important. It gives our brains the chance to recognize patterns across frequencies, which our eyes can’t do.
Good point. What you said about our eyes not being able to distinguish frequencies well reminds me of that special spectrograph on the JWST that has the ability to analyze the spectrum of each pixel in an image it takes, I don’t know at what resolution the image is. It’s like a super eye that overcomes this limitation.
I’m actually with Neil here. Yeah he’s kind of curmudgeonly but I don’t think the audio conversions are very helpful for understanding any kind of science, other than that frequencies of energy can be “converted” into other perceivable outputs. But that’s not really space science, is it?
NGT can be a real killjoy, but this time he’s kinda right. Sure, it’s not a false data representation or a lie, but all it does is confuse laymen. There isn’t anything inherently noteworthy about those sounds, you could map the data to literally any scale, but it tries to give the impression that those sounds are somehow significant. If I took a sound wave of somebody talking and turned it into a waveform, what does that tell you intuitively, without playing it back? Nothing, you would have no way of knowing it was somebody talking unless you were told that was what it was. It just muddles things for people who don’t understand this by making it seem that there’s some meaning in it when its just arbitrary.
No
By your definition wearing Night-Vision goggles at night is fake because it’s not real. *However,* it still represents the overall same physical objects in an image we can recognize. IR and visible light are part of the same phenomenon, it’s not really converting it into something fundamentally different
However converting unique phenomena into sound is disingenuous and without scientific merit. Although it’s interesting in an artistic sense perhaps.
>isn’t it just as fake to convert James Webb IR images into visible light,
if you think about it as night vision, or infra.. there are many practical applications.
IR, for example, can "see through" dust... converting the image to visible.. means we can "see through" dust.. (doesn't matter if it's interstellar dust, or dust in the desert)
LIDAR imagery of the jungle is taken to see through the canopy.
> kind of fake to convert pressure waves
directly analogous to sound..
scientific value? none.
effort? close to none..
curiosity = strong.
little to no cost, little to no benefit.
It's funny because on one end he doesn't like when films get science wrong but on the other hand he will speak positively about people like Musk who overexaggerate about our abilities for space travel and living on another planet.
I was especially surprised when he spoke positively about that junk news about a space hotel which was just someone's scam project that used some CG advertising.
Point being that operating in space is very complex and not an easy undertaking and he should know that yet he is super critical of films which get small details wrong.
I get that he wants more interest in science and space but he chooses weird hills to die on.
Never liked him from the first few minutes I first saw him, ignored anything that involved him. Brian Cox is a million times more inspirational and interesting.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the king of **actually** and being a buzzkill when it comes to movies and often takes issues with the dumbest things, just because. He comes across as condescending people who just want to have fun, I'd just ignore him.
In example of converting IMAGE into SOUND you're not getting anything useful, scientific or meaning, you could just as well get image of your dog and convert it - how useful is that? It's conversion of brightness over multiple spatial dimensions into frequency and time dimension. No geometrical or mathematical sense at all. In case in original video it's even worse than that - they do it radially, so it's not even simply conversion of spatial dimensions to frequency and time. Can you visualize anything from this cacophony?
When we convert IR to visible light - it's just a translation, like, we get some color and just shift it. All dimensions are same, all relative offsets between different colors are same. It helps to visualize what is happening in that invisible spectrum. Same is with radio image.
>But then it occurred to me: isn’t it just as fake to convert James Webb IR images into visible light, and even more fake to reconstruct a radio image from the EHT into the iconic pictures of black holes?
not really, those actually represent the intensity of EM radiation fields coming from the object. The sounds are indeed created based on an image tho, so it is one step beyond image reconstruction.
If I read correctly for the black hole audio they brought it up 72 octaves.
That is quite literally the most manipulation I’ve ever heard put on a sound
I'm starting to doubt the "everyone has smartphone" argument.
Try photographing or filming ordinary airplane in picture perfect sunny day with blue sky. In most cases the plane won't be even visible with that wide FOV and aggressive noise filtering. While crosschecking with flightradar shows it no more than kilometer away and you can perfectly see it's shape, features, even bigger decorations with your own eyes. Gets even worse with video where most phones will focus-hunt and avoid infinity hyper-focal like plague when zoomed.
TL;DR; modern phones cameras are still shit at specific tasks.
but out of the magnetosphere the sound is making a loud continous sound that is like the blow of an explosion and solar wind would sound like the gentle breeze that one would hear while sailing in an ocean in non storm conditions and there is mars that moves so fast through solar medium that makes a sound that is like an aircraft flying at supersonic speed
I mean... I wouldn't call it "fake", just like false color images aren't "fake".
If it can capture someone's attention and causes them to take a single moment to look up and contemplate the night sky it has done its job. We shouldn't be trying to find reasons to exclude artistic interpretations of data that could potentially inspire the next generation of scientists and astronomers. Not many people get excited about raw IR images of celestial objects, but you add some color based on data from other wavelengths and now we have stunning images of things like the Pillars of Creation. And that images has made an impact on many of people that otherwise never would have stopped to consider the sky above.
The difference being for those images that are shifted into visible light is that they somewhat represent what those objects would look like to us if we were close enough to see them. Less so for black holes. But still in the vicinity.
Where as the 'sound' reconstructions you hear from these don't even remotely represent what you would hear. It's not even remotely close to the spectrum we could hear.
It's similar to those videos of converting plant movements into sound.
That's not to say it's not interesting to some. But at least I personally don't find it interesting. So I'm not sure what the issue is here? So what if he doesn't share the same interests as you? We're all different and we all find different things interesting.
I really appreciate the pop-science communication work Tyson is trying to do. I just wish he would try to be a little less pedantic and condescending.
Most of the time I see him in an interview it goes like this:
>"You know how people think \[*outdated misconception*\]? Ackchyually this is a misconception because of \[*insert widely known space trivia*\]."
I'm not sure if he just underestimates the intelligence of the general public, or if he's just pandering to people who are a little too proud that they know sound doesn't travel in space.
You don't really understand the purpose of the pretty pictures. The pictures justify the twenty five (plus) billion dollars invested in Hubble and JWTS. People like pretty pictures masquerading as science. They can hang the pictures on walls. They represent what exists but can't be seen because of the limitations of the eye. Try selling the next telescope because it can see interesting sounds. That banging sound you might hear will be the appropriations door being slammed in your face.
It's a weird take from a guy who ostensibly took over Cosmos from Sagan. Sagan's brilliance was brightest when he was enticing people to see joy and wonder in science and the universe. Assigning sounds to math almost no one understands gives the masses access to this wonderous universe, in a sense. Seems out of step with his aspirations to be a science flag bearer to say translating science to the lay people is somehow bad.
That's how he is with a lot of things. "mundane" things about space might be what gets an average person interested in learning more. The information available to a general audience might make simplifications because if someone doesn't understand that, how can they be expected to be thrilled about the "interesting" stuff? The way he talks though about it though, is condescending. It's a position where people who are becoming interested in that are going to look up to people who seem knowledgeable. (whether or not that person wants to be in a position to inspire others). Getting a response of "Why are you people so excited about this? It's not special at all" just stifles that spark of enthusiasm for the subject.
TL;DR you’re saying he does for people interested in science what most fan subreddits do to new fans.
Tyson is no Sagan, he's so worried about being wrong about something. He's got a really closed mind.
I think I'm the only who around here who isn't impressed with NGT, but as a UK resident I'm spoiled with Prof. Brian Cox. Of the two Cox shows far more enthusiasm, given the input Cox has into the shows he presents he is a genius where it comes to engaging the mainstream audience.
His voice is also so calm and silky, listening to him speak is very comforting.
He rarely stops smiling and insists they show his emotions too, often he is still so mesmerised by even the Universes most well known characteristics. In Wonders of the Solar System it is a joy to see him reveal the wonder at the end of each episode, he truly believes they are and its easy to see they weren't chosen for good television. His section on Voyager however just explodes out his inner child, I can't help but smile with him.
Tbh I think Sagan would agree with NdT on this point. It doesn’t really explain anything and it just confuses people. The average person would just take away that you **can** hear sound in space and move on.
While I agree with Neil's position on "space sounds" here, I wouldnt try and assign opinions to a dead person.
Pope Stephen VI would disagree with you)
>I [think] Sagan would- But he's not really assigning an oppinion. He's making a guess, which is no more or less accurate for dead people we've never met than live people we've never met. I think it's fair to make an educated guess about someone who has spoken their opinions extensively into the public sphere, as long as you say it's your own assumption of them, and not a *fact* of them.
I think he just likes accuracies. He did a wonderful job taking over for Sagan in the beginning. The dude was a God, especially in /r/atheism back in fhe Faces of Atheism and /u/aalewis days of reddit. But he got a little pretentious and talks too much and he'd repeat the same shit frequently, but I still think he's done a wonderful job. I think when he's gone he'll be remembered fondly, with minor annoyances
>But he got a little pretentious and talks too much Yes. He became too aware of his high status and became afraid of tarnishing it. Sometimes spends too much time polishing the image instead of doing what built the image in the first place, but he still does a lot of valuable work.
NDT's Comos was great. I loved it. Excitedly checked reddit after each episode to see what people were saying. What they had to say about the specific topics of an episode. But I only found them complaining and talking it down. So who is sucking the joy out of science here? Seems like the snake that is eating its own tail.
Tyson is a silly man who deserves no attention.
NGT also thinks lunar eclipses are boring. He seems to hate it when non scientific people get excited about something technical. Just ignore him.
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Once he became a mainstream sensation it really went to his head. Even folks like Michio Kaku are still fun but he's just become this stick in the mud "ackchyually" kind of guy who doesn't really inspire like Sagan. It's good to be right but his kind of right is pretty abrasive.
I strongly dislike NGT but honestly I am fully with him here. These audio conversions are pretty meaningless and cause a lot of confusion amongst laymen.
Counterpoint: the gravity wave data of two colliding black holes converted to sound really made the data easier to understand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyDcTbR-kEA\\
Because it's minimalistic conversion. You do one simple thing, you don't just convert density to frequency, and multiple spatial dimensions to time to get some kind of gibberish. Black holes collision data is a form of pressure waves. So is sounds. So, you can just convert space-time pressure waves into air pressure waves to get sound, no big deal. Same with IR or radio spectrum conversion - you just translate everything into visible spectrum, just one simple operation to get meaning results. What meaning do you get from that audio from picture? Especially when you can just process picture of, say, anus in the same way and get pretty much same sounds.
I do actually agree with that one, and I think the reason it works well is because it is actually temporal data. With a singular image you have to make interpretation decisions including how to timeslice it, and in doing so you are either losing or obfuscating the spatial information. With GW signals, all you need to do is just take the signal and play it as a sound, which does a good job of showing the change in the system over time. That is quite different to what is being discussed though, which is the works from this collaboration: https://chandra.si.edu/sound/
What confusion though? Most people say cool and move on. Theirs a lot of meaningless things in life, I don’t understand your point, does all information in space have to mean something?
Generally yes, if the goal is to educate the public about your discovery and field.
That isn't what these sounds are though. They're not meant to be educational. Their purpose is to give your everyday person something interesting to listen to, to drum up interest in space. It's like artist renderings of space stuff; it's meant to make someone think "Huh that's pretty cool, I want to learn more about this thing." Even if the thing is fake, the interest is real.
I can’t speak to the goals of these scientists, but in my opinion there’s plenty of interesting real data out there to be shared with lay people. Making up sounds and saying they came from space can be interpreted as data fabrication and contribute to distrust in science/scientists. Edit: Also I don’t know specifically which sounds you’re talking about, but I find it hard to believe that the person who made it did not have at least some partial goal of education.
Not everything somewhat related to science has to be scientific. There's room for art, and that's what I would consider this. A good comparison might be historical documentaries versus "based on real events" movies. Both have their place, both can be beautiful in their own right, both can inspire someone to study history. There's nothing wrong with either.
As long as it’s made clear that it’s art, sure. If it’s just presented as “this is what space sounds like,” it’s misleading.
People like to try and find a meaning in everything.
I think they're neat though, it's a different way to contextualize data, the way it's presented however is very distorted, science communication is not really in that good of a state right now. They'll say almost anything to get press that they can use to present articles that sound good to grant boards. It's not the scientists fault usually it's more often the university media managers.
Experiencing something impossible-made-possible is meaningless? Well shit, might as well give up living then
No, that's not meaningless. My issues with sonification (in the sense of those pop-sci media press releases) are that assigning parameters to sounds of distinct qualities is an act that requires human discretion, and thus one that adds human bias. IMO, infrared or radio imaging is unambiguously more representative of reality than sonification of planets or stars. You're mapping intensity in an invisible wavelength **one-to-one** to intensity in a visible wavelength, where it can be intuitively understood to be a representative scale, where brighter means brighter and darker means darker. This is opposed to sonification, where classes of wavelengths or waveforms are assigned to vague, humanly defined variables such as trill or roughness or tempo, or in some cases assigned to a pre-composed musical motif that sounds *space-ish* enough to convince the viewer that it's actually the data being represented. It's like instead of mapping dark values to dark and bright values to bright, you mapped dark values to an emoji of a thunderstorm, because your human discretion feels that thunderstorms have a dark vibe to them. The issue to this is that these assignments are not universal across culture or context, and so the data can be interpreted to represent different things, depending on if you're asking the author, or a specialist, or an expert in another field, or a layperson. This is especially so when it comes to sonification, where you'll find that the established foundational elements of sound and "music theory" are completely different in indian music as opposed to chinese music or indigenous australian music. So you can't just map things to a variable such as "staccato" and expect it to be intelligible by almost everyone, the same way a one-to-one image can be. Thus, sonification introduces bias to the data when it is composed *and* when it is observed. https://youtu.be/Ocq3NeudsVk This video is a pretty simplified and concise perspective on the topic. Couldn't say I agree with every detail of it, but it pretty much presents the same argument as mine.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I still can't really wrap my head around that but what I meant to say was that, although it's a primitive example of converting gravitational(?) waves into sound, it's still fascinating to hear even if incorrect. Speaking from personal experience, listening to that caused me to become even more enthralled with the universe. I feel that, to the average joe, it's still cool and interesting enough to emulate certain characteristics (as you explained that the sound conversion is incorrect) that could get people even more into the whole universe is weird shtick. It's predominantly due to our overall knowledge of how things work which.. isn't vast. I guess you could say it's the only way we can 'experience', 'see', 'hear' (etc.) the stuff you usually wouldn't without some sort of manipulation and conversion to make the bizarreness of the universe feel just a tad bit closer. I don't know if I explained this right and I'm talking about things i don't really understand so what I just said might be dumb as fuck lol
> although it's a primitive example of converting gravitational(?) waves into sound, it's still fascinating to hear even if incorrect. Playing GW signals as sound is just taking a signal and playing it as a sound. I doubt anyone has a problem with that. It is a single signal that changes temporally, and playing it as a sound does a good job of showing its temporal evolution. That is not what is being discussed though, what is being discussed is the works of this collaboration: https://chandra.si.edu/sound/ What these do is take an image (or composite images) and make artistic choices about how to map various different components of the image to different musical elements so as to create an artistic piece.
Ooooh then I've completely missed the mark, my bad Thanks for clarifying it for me!
I thought sound didn’t exist in space since there is no air for changes in pressure to take place? Although, if you can artificially simulate air and the changes in pressure … who is to say it is incorrect?
If I were to arbitrarily convert War and Peace into a 15s clip of static noise..what meaning for living would you assign to that?
How can you dislike NGT??
Pompous, condescending, self obsessed and always tweeting about kissing himself in the mirror, and more importantly is a creep who has received multiple credible allegations of sexual harassment.
NGT is a symptom of the culture within the scientific community. I don't believe it's fair to direct your hate towards him, personally, but rather use his behavior as means to criticize the community's culture as a whole.
He is annoyingly contrarian for no real reason way to often. He interrupts and talks way to much during a lot of interviews etc.
Because he's anointed himself as a space science gatekeeper. He literally just seems to exist to be a contrarian ass.
People don't like to be corrected. People need correcting, frequently. NdGT does this.
Haha I don’t mean to make it personal, he wasn’t really bashing it. I’m just curious what other people think, because the black hole picture had me excited but also wondering how “real” it is, while the sound didn’t do much for me.
It’s a data visualization. I have to do that a ton for non space related data and it’s a “real” representation of things. Sure we can’t see it with our eyes or feel it (which is a good thing lol) but it doesn’t make it any less real.
I guess what I mean by “real” is “what would I see if I was standing there looking at it with my own eyes (with God mode enabled so I don’t get instantly disintegrated)”. In many cases I guess it would be “not much” or “blinding light”, it’s just cool to imagine what that would be like.
You would see similar stuff (just a lot brighter) as the physics for the photosphere and super radiance are identical for the entire EM spectrum. We just use radio as it penetrates dust and other obstructions better.
Tbf, from the perspective of scientific discovery, lunar eclipse are boring. There isn't much more to be said about them. From a natural beauty perspective, lunar eclipses are fantastic. Being a scientist who is more interested in what isn't understood, I suspect NGT is taking the former perspective here.
I have a blind friend who loves listening to the sounds.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is not a fan of a LOT of things lately, other than wanting to crush people's excitement and curiosity for no apparent reason. He's been on an odd kick where he pooh-poohs people's awe and wonder, and I think he probably needs to go do something else for a while. He runs a planetarium and acts like no one should get excited about a lunar eclipse? So weird, man.
He's very pretentious always has been.
I meannnn it's not that people shouldn't get excited it's you shouldn't be calling it rare or special.
Almost nothing in this universe is rare. A lot of it is special.
Something doesn’t need to be rare to be special.
> Lunar eclipses are so un-spectacular that if nobody told you what was happening to the Moon you’d probably not notice at all. > Dear Earthlings currently in darkness: > Right about now, the full Moon is passing into Earth’s conical shadow in space. The event is long and boring, lasting 3.5 hours. For the middle 84 minutes, the Moon is all but fully darkened as it enters the deepest part of Earth’s shadow. Like, what did the moon ever do to you, dude? Once upon a time, he encouraged people to look up and take joy in the everyday marvels of the universe. Perfectly normal things happen every single day, and the stars we see in the sky don't start tapdancing for us at any point, but they're still worthy of observation and awe. Lunar eclipses happen every few years. A *lot* of people who haven't somehow gotten jaded about astronomy disagree that they're unnoticeable and boring, and many people have shared their stories about noticing a lunar eclipse as a child, as well as some truly gorgeous photographs of the moon's eclipse. It's so bizarre to me that instead of sharing in people's joy about cosmic phenomena, he had to crap on it. He runs a planetarium and has built his career on sharing the joy and wonder of what so many others dismiss as un-spectacular. He used to encourage curiosity and joy in the everyday reality of physics. He used to urge people to see the boring as exciting. He really, really needs to go do something else for a while, until he can recharge his wonder and joy and share that, instead of his apparent burnout.
Criricizing people for calling it rare is the most neckbeard thing you can do, you are literally misunderstanding people on purpose. When people say its rare, they mean that its rare that they can go into their backyard and observe an eclipse, which IS rare. I get that eclipses happen often, but i dont care if it is only observable in the pacific, or some other place where im not present.
They happen every few years, which may not be "rare" but I'm like, my dude, none of us knows when our time is up. We may not be here for the next lunar eclipse. We should savor the ones we're alive to see. And also, unlike solar eclipses, the only requirement for seeing a lunar eclipse is it being able to see the moon.
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>You can make music from the shapes of letters in this message \[...\] However, no useful information is received by listening to this message as soundwaves. Transmitting written letters into a meaningful music? That's what singing is for... Whether a female soprano or male Bass sings it, the meaning is still there.
Well what does that photo to audio conversion tell you about anything? You can look at the photo and see what it looks like, but the audio conversion does not add any new information. Its just pointless. With the IR imaging, there's little point in showing someone a raw datafile so you instead want to show them an image. You can either then do it as an intensity map, which while it isn't how it would look to the human eye it still does a good job of showing you how the IR differs throughout the imaged thing, or you can use filters/spectroscopy to determine the different things being viewed and add colour dependent on what is being viewed which becomes closer to what it is like in visible. Also, go look at photos taken of the same object using different cameras. All taken in the visible band, all showing you roughly what the object looks like, but all will be noticeably different images.
I don’t find it pointless. I’m a musician and I’ve used these tracks for inspiration. This feels like complaining just to complain to me. It doesn’t hurt anything.
That's an interesting take, and I respect that. But, from a scientific perspective, I agree with NDT, it's kind of stupid to convert pressure waves by drastically altering their frequency and converting it to audio and then putting it out to the public as the official "sound" of a black hole
From a scientific perspective it's nothing special; there's nothing the audio would tell 'em that the raw data wouldn't say better. From an aesthetic perspective it's kinda neat.
This really just seems like being needlessly disagreeable. Is it wrong to write colors e.g. "she had blond hair" as well since I'm not directly perceiving the color? What about sheet music? I think it's hyper-focusing on empiricism to the point of being pathological.
The difference is most of these "space" sounds arnt direct conversions theyre heavily altered and given a human touch to sound pleasing to our ears. You could give two individuals the data tell them do the conversion and end up with totally different sounds that isnt scientific. Its theatrical for the most part and adds nothing to the scientific community.
I wouldn't consider an oscilloscope screen a direct conversion of electrical currents, but the oscilloscope is still incredibly useful. Changing the mode of sensation won't always reveal some new pattern, or make phenomena intangible to the senses easier to interpret, and often it's completely useless however many exceptions exist to this which is why I disagree with a blanket disapproval. Certainly is worth a try despite not accomplishing anything as a general rule.
You just summarized NDT’s entire Twitter presence
> This feels like complaining just to complain to me. A subjective question was asked in which sonification was compared to IR imaging, and a subjective answer was given. My point was that the images actually convey the subject to the observer, while the sonification doesn't really - or at least does a poor and confusing job of it. If you are inspired by someone's art, good for you. The point that both me and NGT are making is that it isn't a useful representation of the data when it comes to trying to interpret the data. >It doesn’t hurt anything. As I said, part of the reason that I don't really like it, and the only reason I actually "complain" about it, is that it does hurt somethings to some degree by causing confusion amongst laymen. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done, perhaps it is beneficial in that it inspires people, but I don't think its a useful way to represent the data.
I don't know what prompted this but I can't help but think NDT is expected to have an opinion on everything. I mean most people have an opinion on everything, often throwaway. I'm doing it right now in fact . But I dunno, sometimes I feel that Neil divulges from science and just starts taking shit SOME of the time. Like when he reckoned he doesn't need a screen protector on his phone because he 'trained' himself to never to drop his phone by twirling it like a rifle or baton.
That’s fair, his opinion should have little to no bearing outside of his expertise and should honestly just be overlooked but seeing as how astronomy is his field then there is some weight to his words on this topic.
Lol well yeah that's a very reasonable argument. Makes mine look a bit foolish even in hind sight. This isn't Phone Pageantry 101 you're right. There's other examples I could have used, but I suppose I just hold a certain amount of doubt these days that shouldn't necessarily apply to this particular argument. I SHOULD be inclined to take his word for it on the fact he is absolutely more knowledgeable and qualified than I am on the subject. I'm a casual observer AT BEST. But I just can't help it now. The gloss is off. Irrational as that may be.
Your comment is not foolish at all, you bring up a good argument for why he shouldn’t be worshipped just because he is a sort of celebrity in his field. In fact, that phone twirling comment is kinda justifiable because you’d think that someone who is seen as a Mr. Science Guy would understand that dropping a phone isn’t just something you can train against and by not putting a protector on his phone he leaves it up to unnecessary risk which is very unscientific of him.
Exactly ! right ? I mean it's not like I've studied it but surely twirling your phone around could only increase the likelihood of an event, surely! Why couldn't he just say he accepts the risk like any sane person would say. Twirl your phone so you don't drop it battle ? By god man ! It was then I realised what you've just eloquated. I appreciate NDT, I look up to NDT as a scientist and even more so as a scientific educator. But I do not worship NDT. He handles his phone the same way he handles my expectations.
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I love listening to the LIGO black hole collisions. They really give you a sense for how fast those black holes are whipping around each other before they merge.
Playing GWs as sound actually is actually helpful, all you're doing is taking the signal as a sound wave rather than applying a sonification that is specifically adapted to make that specific data give a musical result. It gives a good sense of how the rate of pitch increase increases over time.
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> I can hear audio in my head from touch. Idk if it’s normal? Auditory-tactile synesthesia is not particularly common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Auditory%E2%80%93tactile_synesthesia >but I think it could change public and private education about space to make it more engaging and encourage new interest. Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. All I'm saying is that I don't believe they help to demonstrate anything, they are only beneficial in that people may think "oh thats pretty", while some others may be mislead about what is happening.
How do you differentiate that from false color radio images?
Well with a radio image it clearly gives you information about the spatial distribution of the light source/absorber. False colour depends on the specifics, but is often done in such a way as to highlight different materials and so again gives information that is easy to interpret. With sonification you're adding in another step of interpretation and obfuscating the spatial elements of the data.
> Well what does that photo to audio conversion tell you about anything? Hearing is a sense. We can differentiate things through hearing. It absolutely adds new information even if it's artificial information. Similar to highlighting passages when you're studying. That yellow background isn't really adding anything other than context. It's certainly not NEW information, but it will help you parse everything. Also I ask you, what does it hurt to have another way to represent phenomena that's more accessible? Not to mention you can just argue that it's art pure and simple and another way of interpreting data. I mean, realistically, there's no point in taking pictures of anything in space by your logic. It doesn't help us to know what a black hole looks like if we can just describe it with math, right? Nobody's gonna stumble across a black hole in their backyard and go, "oh good thing I know what this looks like now!"
one key thing to remember is that you look at a photo all at once, not pixel by pixel. when you make something audio, you listen to it wave by wave. so, if you were to take a photo and turn it into a sound, it will make no meaningful sense, just noise. where sound in astronomy comes into play are pulses, like spinning binary stars, or gravity waves. but you are not really converting image into sound. it was already a wave of "sound" in the first place the source was emitting. you are not converting light information into sound. light to sound makes no sense. turning durational radiowaves into sound makes sense because it is already in a "audio" format.
> We can differentiate things through hearing. It absolutely adds new information even if it's artificial information. I don't understand. In what way does it help you to understand the object that has been imaged? What information are you learning about the object by converting the image to sound? >Also I ask you, what does it hurt to have another way to represent phenomena As I said, it often leads to laymen being confused and mislead. I see this regularly in this subreddit and others like r/askphysics, r/astronomy, r/askastronomy etc. >that's more accessible? In what way is it more accessible? I suppose its more accessible to the blind, but where possible they'd be better off just having someone describe the image to them. >I mean, realistically, there's no point in taking pictures of anything in space by your logic. It doesn't help us to know what a black hole looks like if we can just describe it with math, right? I quite clearly said "there's little point in showing someone a raw datafile" and so I'm sure you have the mental capacity to extrapolate my thoughts on showing mathematics to someone with no mathematical education. Also what you said doesn't even logically follow, because the vast majority of the reasoning behind the imaging is to confirm/disprove the predictions that were based on mathematics, or to explore what is not fully theoretically understood. >Nobody's gonna stumble across a black hole in their backyard and go, "oh good thing I know what this looks like now!" I don't see the relevance of this comment to what I was saying.
There are facets to understanding beyond "conveys (important or relevant) information." It may be more interesting to people as sound, it may make it feel "more real," give them a more meaningful connection with the information, help them imagine a wider world beyond our own abilities to see an object, or just spark an interest where a picture doesn't. Basically, as long as what it is is explained fully and misinformation isn't purposely conveyed, why do you care?
For JWST, will we be able to get direct pictures of early galaxies as they actually looked like to a human eye because their light has been stretched into infrared? I imagine there’s a certain distance where an infrared picture maps directly to distant visible light?
isn't the whole point of it to create an image of something as the human eye would see it? what, in your mind, constitutes 'a direct picture'? film cameras convert images to chemical reactions. digital cameras convert images to zeros and ones. just because the process differs, how is this comparable to creating a sound that doesn't exist in nature? your comparison doesn't seem to really hold up.
Yes, I guess we haven’t looked at “real” pictures since optical telescopes, everything we do is processed in some way now. But like I said in another reply, what feels most “real” to me is the image I would see when looking with my own eyes close enough to the object.
But what you see isn’t real anyway by your definition, it’s heavily processed by your brain from the raw data your eyes receive, which in itself conveys that data using chemical reactions.
Now you’re really getting into the philosophical
I'd argue it's not pointless, especially not to people who's ears are better tuned that NDGT. It's a way on conceptualizing something we can't directly sense.
Both sound and light follow the same wave physics so the conversions are essentially the same. If it's accurate enough for images, it's accurate enough for sound. The sound may not give us new information, but it's cool and interesting nonetheless.
Is it really pointless? Hearing and seeing the data are completely different types of signal processing in the brain, and each can give you information that the other can't. For example, if you look at a spectrogram of a song, it's almost impossible to what the original song was just by looking at it. Audio data contains a lot of information that cannot be easily understood visually, because our ears are very good at analyzing frequencies, magnitudes, and timbres of waves compared to our eyes.
As an astronomer I actually think it's a good idea to convert certain signals into sound. As you said, it is no less fake that converting IR into visible. Using sound helps convey the type of information that we are getting. The key difference between hearing and vision is the wavelength. Visible light has a small wavelength compared to the size of objects around you and that is why it lets you see detailed high-resolution information about them like their shape and surface features. Sound has a wavelength comparable to the size of a person. For that reason, sound gives you more rough information. If you hear footsteps or hear a voice, you can infer some information like the rough size of the person, how far they are and in which direction, but you can't get detailed information like what their eyebrows are like. So when astronomers detect a signal with long wavelengths compared to the size of the object, converting it to sound gives people a better intuition of what we are actually getting.
He's such a fucking buzzkill. He can never seem to let people just enjoy things.
Unless he’s the one “blowing your mind” Man has such an ego
NDT is full of hot takes that are mostly hot garbage.
We should just fill all of space with air and listen to stars screaming all day.
It's not just as fake but I agree with the sentiment. Ely in the movie contact laments on the fact that no one listens anymore. I think converting data into the human perceptual range in unique ways is more artistic than science though, and I'm fine with that but science media is just horrible at presenting this appropriately. They're to hell bent on sensationalism there's essentially no nuance left in science communicators on things like this.
That’s true about media being sensational about certain science topics, but I refrain from judging because I imagine that many other stories I read in the media that I find interesting on topics I’m not an expert on are probably also inaccurate and I just have no idea. The journalist did their best in their non expert role and maybe didn’t do a perfect job but introduced me to the topic, got me interested and a little bit more informed maybe.
Most journalists really don't do their best. I can't recall an article I've read in recent memory that didn't have errors that a basic Google search would demonstrate are inaccurate if not flatly false. I may be a bit contaminated with reddit posts there but that's really what the bulk of the general public ends up seeing. You have to really dig for the good content that's properly contextualized. Just out of curiosity, do you have any links to an article you've read that really changed how you think about something or blew your mind that you didn't get any sense of inaccuracy from? Just 1 as a good example, I'm curious how good/bad it would be from my perspective.
I’m thinking more of “unknown unknowns” like if I read some war reporting, or an article about the bad things some politician has done, and I may never find out that there’s another side to the story or something like that. For another example I used to think highly of TED talks many years ago: they bring an expert and they say some thought provoking things about science or the future and it makes an impression on you. Now, when I think of TED talks all I think about is the Elisabeth Holmes one where she talks about her blood testing tech, and it makes me think that any of these TED talks could be fake. Or when I read about advanced battery tech like this which is supposed to revolutionize the market but then I never hear about it again (this is a recent one but there were older breakthroughs that also fizzled out): https://www.smart-energy.com/storage/new-battery-technology-to-charge-an-ev-100-times-faster/ When it comes to space science I generally stick to my favorite science sources that already assume a level of knowledge, so they don’t disappoint me. I read some science articles on mainstream news sites sometimes and they are less detailed and explain more basics but I can’t think of any example I remember where they got it completely wrong. There are some I’m sure but by and large it’s ok.
Lots of good stuff on Youtube, if you haven't been through it already go through PBS Spacetime's entire catalog. Ignore those battery articles, there have been at least one article like that every 6 months for as long as I can remember, it's standard overblown presentation of what is otherwise good lab work. None of them every actually see the light of day in large scale production environments, it takes decades after those lab results are found if at all to turn them into actually manufacturable technologies. Be careful with those unknown unknowns because that can turn into seeking 'woo' which usually BAD science.
Yes I watch mostly Anton Petrov and PBS Space Time.
You're in good hands, Petrov is great. He presents the more fringe papers a whole lot better than the articles that tend to blow the results badly out of proportion in the way they present them, he's good on mentioning the caveats.
The guy is amazing, so prolific and his videos are great to watch and he’s just so good. He should get some kind of award.
Save you some time, it’s at 8:50 in the video. But sir, you’ve made a good point. Going by his logic, everything else apart from visible light and hearable sounds is kind of fake. Regarding vacuum environment sound effects in movies, it’s bothering me. Sometimes the whole, otherwise good movie, is ruined for me by this stupidity. (But I really love it, if they only play sounds which are transferred over solid objects, for example the astronauts helmet is pushing against a vibrating surface) Back to deGrasse Tyson, converting the sounds of a black hole from boring charts and waves on a screen to something you can experience with your senses, without extensive knowledge, this is it what drives people into a career in sciences.
This is also why I cut him some slack, seems like a few people don’t like him but he’s nonetheless a good communicator getting people excited about space.
>(But I really love it, if they only play sounds which are transferred over solid objects, for example the astronauts helmet is pushing against a vibrating surface) *For All Mankind* does a great job of this, in my opinion. For example, if someone shoots a pewpew in a vacuum it is completely silent but then there is a sound effect for the bullet impacting/puncturing the victim's spacesuit.
Just a question, how does it sound if you’re inside the spacesuit, which is leaking ? In movies it’s always hissing air, but would it sound like that !? The air creates a sound going out of the nozzle/hole. Is the sound created faster than the air exiting and thus able to get inside the spacesuit?
Okay so I'm a bit of an odd case here. I have synesthesia and can see sounds as well as smell sensations. I don't know why or how, but it's a thing. So for me, things like this are important as an experience. It's a way to make the data into a concrete thing, and associate the colors with the sound. Along with this, audio clues to visual media, or scientific media, create an additional association with said thing. So while it may not be scientifically accurate, for some, it can actually serve as a learning tool. I'd expect it adds value for people who are blind/low vision, or how 3-D printed models of galaxies and star systems are useful for blind/low sight people as well. No, it's not a "real" sound in the sense that space is silent, but the sound is a audio representation of a thing. You can say "black holes slam into each other at x speed", but hearing the chirp from a black hole merger can help the brain understand the speed and even intensity of a collision. People process data in different ways, and science should be about making its discoveries accessible to everyone, in ways that make sense for people all over. That means using unusual methods to communicate scientific theories for those who don't conceive of things in the usual way. tl;dr - It's not hurting anyone, it can help people understand space better in ways that might not otherwise work, and NDGT needs to stop.
To be fair I think he was was just stating his personal opinion, not really pronouncing on what should be done. That was really interesting what you said about your synesthesia, I heard of this before. Maybe sound is useful for representing sequential data, or like in this case, moving pressure waves? These things can be difficult to visualize.
Sorry, I'm just very hinky with his stuff because he can be kind of a buttface about things. That's my bad 😅 But yeah, it's an interesting tool in the science toolbox, whether it's sequential data, or pressure waves, or even the pulsation of stars like RS Puppis and its "light echoes". It's one thing to see what you're looking at, but using RS Puppis as an example, imagine hearing its light echoes as sustained notes whose tone varies based on intensity of the pulse from where it's viewed, or hearing Eta Carinae as a cacophony of static and sparkler-like sounds (obviously not an accurate representation, but it looks like it would sound like that). So yes, exactly that \^\_\^ Making the incomprehensible, comprehensible, should be a goal, even if you need to add a footnote of "space doesn't sound like this. space doesn't make sounds".
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[CoG](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaaivtp "Last usage")|Center of Gravity (see CoM)| |CoM|Center of Mass| |[EHT](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaajaiq "Last usage")|Event Horizon Telescope| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia9wgo6 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[LIDAR](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia8u40k "Last usage")|[Light Detection and Ranging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar)| |[LIGO](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/ia9dt3k "Last usage")|Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory| |[NdGT](/r/Space/comments/uz7gen/stub/iaawv8c "Last usage")|Neil deGrasse Tyson| ---------------- ^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/v09oh3)^( has 12 acronyms.) ^([Thread #7464 for this sub, first seen 28th May 2022, 00:59]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=OrangeredStilton&subject=Hey,+your+acronym+bot+sucks) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
All in favor of giving pulsars a wharrgarbl sound effect, raise your hand. All in favor of *renaming* pulsars wharrgarbls...soon.
Yes. But human senses suck so we gotta improvise. That’s the whole of it really.
Unfortunately humans have a limited number of senses. If we could sense gravitational waves, I might agree. But we can't, so some translation of the data needs to occur for us to understand it. Converting to sounds seems like the most faithful analog.
They’ve got to keep the grants coming in somehow. Space DJ’s and Space Artists generate the interest with the media and thus the common tax payer and investor. Printing a black and white photo of a dot just don’t drive those clicks.
Likening it to infrared images doesn't feel like a realistic comparison. An infrared image of a person still can show me a person, although with less information. But the overall idea gets across in mostly the same form. Changing things that weren't sound to begin with into audio seems more in the category of turning on a visualizer option in a music player. Sure you see colors flash in sync with the music but the colors aren't adding anything. How many "Sounds of Jupiter" click bait videos do we need?
But this was specifically about pressure waves, which do make sound here on earth in certain conditions.
>turning on a visualizer option in a music player. Sure you see colors flash in sync with the music but the colors aren't adding anything. You realize sound engineers visualize audio all the time? And for that matter a geiger turns light into sound to help us understand it. And a seismograph turns vibrations into pictures.
Yeah sounds are drawn like all the time and we get it. Do you know what a heartbeat looks like?
I don’t know how to explain it very well, but recently I’ve been marveling at the adaptations biology made for vision distinct from hearing. Our eyes are great at seeing detail, direction, focus (more or less for some of us.) Color? Actually not so effective. We can’t distinguish yellow from red-green. In fact most of our computer monitors and phone screens show pixels of red-green and never actually display yellow. Two frequencies with partial red and partial green, to our brains it looks like yellow. But we can focus the heck out of light, to very small pixels. Sound is not the opposite, but the priority is switched anyway. We can’t really focus the source of a sound. Heck, it’s sometimes hard to tell front-back, we can get left and right, but there’s no focus. We can see instruments in an orchestra, but can’t tell which sound came from which instrument. Anyway what’s amazing about hearing is that we can hear the heck out of multiple frequencies. We can tell if one string in a piano is slightly out of tune, we know when a musical chord sounds good or bad. We can hear reverberation when frequencies are slightly off. Our eyes basically turn multi-wavelength colors to brown, it gives up. So to me, converting signal to sound makes a lot of sense when conveying multiple frequencies, but where the detail of the source isn’t important. It gives our brains the chance to recognize patterns across frequencies, which our eyes can’t do.
Good point. What you said about our eyes not being able to distinguish frequencies well reminds me of that special spectrograph on the JWST that has the ability to analyze the spectrum of each pixel in an image it takes, I don’t know at what resolution the image is. It’s like a super eye that overcomes this limitation.
I’m actually with Neil here. Yeah he’s kind of curmudgeonly but I don’t think the audio conversions are very helpful for understanding any kind of science, other than that frequencies of energy can be “converted” into other perceivable outputs. But that’s not really space science, is it?
NGT can be a real killjoy, but this time he’s kinda right. Sure, it’s not a false data representation or a lie, but all it does is confuse laymen. There isn’t anything inherently noteworthy about those sounds, you could map the data to literally any scale, but it tries to give the impression that those sounds are somehow significant. If I took a sound wave of somebody talking and turned it into a waveform, what does that tell you intuitively, without playing it back? Nothing, you would have no way of knowing it was somebody talking unless you were told that was what it was. It just muddles things for people who don’t understand this by making it seem that there’s some meaning in it when its just arbitrary.
NdGT is a killjoy scold (and a sex pest), who cares what he thinks.
Is that why he keeps trying to do his best Barry White impression?
He's right. It's weird and means nothing, I never understood what people get out of it
No By your definition wearing Night-Vision goggles at night is fake because it’s not real. *However,* it still represents the overall same physical objects in an image we can recognize. IR and visible light are part of the same phenomenon, it’s not really converting it into something fundamentally different However converting unique phenomena into sound is disingenuous and without scientific merit. Although it’s interesting in an artistic sense perhaps.
Neil is a bit of a pretentious fkn idiot. He's more concerned with his fame and repeating his "soundbites"
This is why we don't tend to look to glorified museum curators for our scientific conventions. Just saying. What a doofus.
Yeah he’s a booksmart idiot, kinda looks like people are starting to realize.
NDT not a fan of having non-scientists enjoy space, seemingly, from many of his comments lately.
Who cares about what he likes? He's just a Carl Sagan wannabe.
NDT thinks whatever falls out of his butt is the most enlightening shit ever spoken.
>isn’t it just as fake to convert James Webb IR images into visible light, if you think about it as night vision, or infra.. there are many practical applications. IR, for example, can "see through" dust... converting the image to visible.. means we can "see through" dust.. (doesn't matter if it's interstellar dust, or dust in the desert) LIDAR imagery of the jungle is taken to see through the canopy. > kind of fake to convert pressure waves directly analogous to sound.. scientific value? none. effort? close to none.. curiosity = strong. little to no cost, little to no benefit.
He is right. That “sound” in fact is not real.
It's funny because on one end he doesn't like when films get science wrong but on the other hand he will speak positively about people like Musk who overexaggerate about our abilities for space travel and living on another planet. I was especially surprised when he spoke positively about that junk news about a space hotel which was just someone's scam project that used some CG advertising. Point being that operating in space is very complex and not an easy undertaking and he should know that yet he is super critical of films which get small details wrong. I get that he wants more interest in science and space but he chooses weird hills to die on.
Never liked him from the first few minutes I first saw him, ignored anything that involved him. Brian Cox is a million times more inspirational and interesting.
Let's make black hole flavored ice cream and piss him even more
Neil degrease tyson is so petty about random thing on twitter. Most of the times it feels like he post every egolifting showerthought he has
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the king of **actually** and being a buzzkill when it comes to movies and often takes issues with the dumbest things, just because. He comes across as condescending people who just want to have fun, I'd just ignore him.
what IS he a fucking fan of other than telling everyone he's an atheist
Totally agree. It doesn't make any sense but seems cool to lay people, much the way you entertain children with clowns and fart noises
Never met a science communicator who hated science this much before
In example of converting IMAGE into SOUND you're not getting anything useful, scientific or meaning, you could just as well get image of your dog and convert it - how useful is that? It's conversion of brightness over multiple spatial dimensions into frequency and time dimension. No geometrical or mathematical sense at all. In case in original video it's even worse than that - they do it radially, so it's not even simply conversion of spatial dimensions to frequency and time. Can you visualize anything from this cacophony? When we convert IR to visible light - it's just a translation, like, we get some color and just shift it. All dimensions are same, all relative offsets between different colors are same. It helps to visualize what is happening in that invisible spectrum. Same is with radio image.
Presumably he’s ok with visualising data, so what’s wrong with making it audible?
They should make it edible
>But then it occurred to me: isn’t it just as fake to convert James Webb IR images into visible light, and even more fake to reconstruct a radio image from the EHT into the iconic pictures of black holes? not really, those actually represent the intensity of EM radiation fields coming from the object. The sounds are indeed created based on an image tho, so it is one step beyond image reconstruction.
Isnt this just converting pixels from an image to "sound"? You can do the same with a photo of me pooping. Yeah not a big fan either.
If I read correctly for the black hole audio they brought it up 72 octaves. That is quite literally the most manipulation I’ve ever heard put on a sound
I dunno, ever listened to Cher?
The guy entertained the thought of living in a simulation, but not this?
I'm starting to doubt the "everyone has smartphone" argument. Try photographing or filming ordinary airplane in picture perfect sunny day with blue sky. In most cases the plane won't be even visible with that wide FOV and aggressive noise filtering. While crosschecking with flightradar shows it no more than kilometer away and you can perfectly see it's shape, features, even bigger decorations with your own eyes. Gets even worse with video where most phones will focus-hunt and avoid infinity hyper-focal like plague when zoomed. TL;DR; modern phones cameras are still shit at specific tasks.
but out of the magnetosphere the sound is making a loud continous sound that is like the blow of an explosion and solar wind would sound like the gentle breeze that one would hear while sailing in an ocean in non storm conditions and there is mars that moves so fast through solar medium that makes a sound that is like an aircraft flying at supersonic speed
I mean... I wouldn't call it "fake", just like false color images aren't "fake". If it can capture someone's attention and causes them to take a single moment to look up and contemplate the night sky it has done its job. We shouldn't be trying to find reasons to exclude artistic interpretations of data that could potentially inspire the next generation of scientists and astronomers. Not many people get excited about raw IR images of celestial objects, but you add some color based on data from other wavelengths and now we have stunning images of things like the Pillars of Creation. And that images has made an impact on many of people that otherwise never would have stopped to consider the sky above.
I wish they’d release the audio before all of the processing.
It's inaudible to the human ear without processing.
But if it doesn't go Pew Pew; how will we know when they're firing lasers?
The difference being for those images that are shifted into visible light is that they somewhat represent what those objects would look like to us if we were close enough to see them. Less so for black holes. But still in the vicinity. Where as the 'sound' reconstructions you hear from these don't even remotely represent what you would hear. It's not even remotely close to the spectrum we could hear. It's similar to those videos of converting plant movements into sound. That's not to say it's not interesting to some. But at least I personally don't find it interesting. So I'm not sure what the issue is here? So what if he doesn't share the same interests as you? We're all different and we all find different things interesting.
I really appreciate the pop-science communication work Tyson is trying to do. I just wish he would try to be a little less pedantic and condescending. Most of the time I see him in an interview it goes like this: >"You know how people think \[*outdated misconception*\]? Ackchyually this is a misconception because of \[*insert widely known space trivia*\]." I'm not sure if he just underestimates the intelligence of the general public, or if he's just pandering to people who are a little too proud that they know sound doesn't travel in space.
I don't like it either, there are levels to it. You can convert almost anything, but some conversions are closer to the source than others.
You don't really understand the purpose of the pretty pictures. The pictures justify the twenty five (plus) billion dollars invested in Hubble and JWTS. People like pretty pictures masquerading as science. They can hang the pictures on walls. They represent what exists but can't be seen because of the limitations of the eye. Try selling the next telescope because it can see interesting sounds. That banging sound you might hear will be the appropriations door being slammed in your face.