Orotund Tones

Some oddaments in search of a theme:

The new Scientific American has an article on the cosmic microwave background claiming that the power in the low spherical harmonics is less than inflation predicts. (Is the Universe out of tune?)

Meanwhile, I have heard that the fact that the density fluctuations in the early Universe are sound-wave-like has caught the interest of the Intelligent Design crowd. From Genesis 1

2 And the earth was without form except for quantum fluctuations, and void (not counting the dilaton field); and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light, or more technically, thermal radiation, subsequently redshifted by cosmic expansion to about 2.7 Kelvins.
And the voice of God was propagated as sound waves on the deep. In combination with our first item, this would seem to imply that the Lord has a rather squeaky voice.

Finally, I happened to catch Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe and Cosmic Variance on NPR the other day, talking about the Templeton Foundation. His (evidently ungodly) orotund tones seemed spookily familiar. Is it just me or has Sean inherited Carl Sagan's voice?

Hold it just a sec Sean - could you say "billions and billions?"

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:31 PM

    Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful

    ReplyDelete

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