What is White Noise?
White noise is a type of noise that is produced by combining sounds of all different frequencies together. If you took all of the imaginable tones that a human can hear and combined them together, you would have white noise.
The adjective “white” is used to describe this type of noise because of the way white light works. White light is light that is made up of all of the different colors (frequencies) of light combined together (a prism or a rainbow separates white light back into its component colors). In the same way, white noise is a combination of all of the different frequencies of sound. You can think of white noise as 20,000 tones all playing at the same time.
Because white noise contains all frequencies, it is frequently used to mask other sounds. If you are in a hotel and voices from the room next-door are leaking into your room, you might turn on a fan to drown out the voices. The fan produces a good approximation of white noise. Why does that work? Why does white noise drown out voices?
Here is one way to think about it. Let’s say two people are talking at the same time. Your brain can normally “pick out” one of the two voices and actually listen to it and understand it. If three people are talking simultaneously, your brain can probably still pick out one voice. However, if 1,000 people are talking simultaneously, there is no way that your brain can pick out one voice. It turns out that 1,000 people talking together sounds a lot like white noise. So when you turn on a fan to create white noise, you are essentially creating a source of 1,000 voices. The voice next-door makes it 1,001 voices, and your brain can’t pick it out any more.
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Fields Discussed: Human body, anatomy, biology, research, medicine, etc.
Extra Information: You’ll also see some microbiology, chemistry, even astronomy. Things that interest me.
Ruđer Josip Bošković
Ruđer Josip Bošković was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, and a poet.
He is famous for his atomic theory and made many important contributions to astronomy, including the first geometric procedure for determining the equator of a rotating planet. In 1753 he also discovered the absence of atmosphere on the Moon.
He investigated all the fields of physical science. Among the subjects were the transit of Mercury, the Aurora Borealis (corona), the figure of the Earth, the observation of the fixed stars, the inequalities in terrestrial gravitation, the application of mathematics to the theory of the telescope, the limits of certainty in astronomical observations, the solid of greatest attraction, the cycloid, the logistic curve, the theory of comets, the tides, the law of continuity, the double refraction micrometer, and various problems of spherical trigonometry.
To not admire this man’s work, and to not see him as an amazing individual would be shameful.
In 1745 Bošković published De Viribus Vivis in which he tried to find a middle way between Isaac Newton’s gravitational theory and Gottfried Leibniz’s metaphysical theory of monad-points. He developed a concept of “impenetrability” as a property of hard bodies which explained their behavior in terms of force rather than matter.
His atomic theory inspired Michael Faraday to develop field theory for electromagnetic interaction.
Some claim that Boškovićian atomism was a basis for Albert Einstein’s attempts for a unified field theory, and that he was the first to envisage, seek, and propose a mathematical theory of all the forces of Nature; the first scientific theory of everything.
