Sound Meets Salt
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Sound is an amazing thing. Though nearly always invisible, it has an incalculably great influence on almost every aspect of our lives. As any 8th grade know-it-all can tell you, sound is nothing more than a series simple pressure waves created by a vibrating source. As with any kind of wave, strange and fascinating things can happen when two or more wave systems come together.
The video above shows how different tones, or frequencies, manifest different complex interference patters when produced by a vibrating metal source. Spots of high energy where waves meet and build each other vibrate rapidly and bounce the salt away, while salt collects in the places where waves meet and cancel each other out. [via]
amazing how symmetrical the natural world is
I saw this long time ago, It is a great demonstration of how powerful sound can be.
What strikes me as fascinating about that is that, as I’d expect, higher energy states (as evidenced by the sound) produce proportionately more complex patterns. It reminds me a lot of electrons jumping from a low energy state to a higher energy state — electron clouds, incidentally, are also symmetrical things even if they’re weirdly defined: barbells, donuts, and so forth.