The Case of the curiously ringing cymbal

Sometimes within the shuffle and bustle of a thread nice little tidbits can get lost. I've tried to bring others' thoughts to the forefront before; indulge me for a moment and allow me to bring one of my own nuggets to the forefront.

I've always loved those mystery books of my youth, starting with Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown and then of course the absolute mystery genius, Agatha Christie. Never was a big fan of the Hardy Boys for some reason. But anyway here's a short mystery from my childhood.

Also think about things like the photovoltaic effect and the fact that light has been shown to have momentum. Momentum w/o mass is impossible. I mean when I was a kid about 7 years old I found my parents' camera with one of those old bright flashes. I flashed it on the cymbal of our drum set. Just you know, experimenting with stuff like we like to do. Guess what? It rang. I turned into one of those caricature kids with the biggest widest open eyes imaginable.

From Tesla/Einstein/Hawking thread

There are simple empirical experiments we can do even as kids that show the absolute folly of most of modern science's reliance on faux mathematical smokescreen and mirror wizardry and hocus pocus nonsense to confuse the lay person out there.

After posting this information above and more, the thread got trashed and moved to the Highly Speculative category.

This is science, not speculation.

Thanks for all of you that supported my position on the thread. They can ridicule us, but they can't defeat us, because it's easy when you have the truth on your side. Lies that they have can't be maintained indefinitely. They have to keep spinning more lies to keep their falsified version of reality going. Eventually though it WILL collapse. As one poster eloquently put it, it's the collapse of the paradigm. Out with the old, in with the new I say. It's about darn time.

I'm a patient dude.

Try repeating the experiment but this time, cover the flash with black paper. In my opinion, its the magnetic flux that is making it ring and not the light.

Originally posted by XL5
Try repeating the experiment but this time, cover the flash with black paper. In my opinion, its the magnetic flux that is making it ring and not the light.

Could be, but it may also just be the hot air in front of the flash, or indeed the heating of that part of the cymbal. Whatever it is, it sure isnt any "momentum" imparted by the flash's photons, as the text seems to imply.

Was it a flash bulb (the pop out and throw away kind), or a really old xenon flash unit?

reply to post by spacedoubt


I believe the xenon type. It was so long ago, and I was just a kid. But it looked a little similar to this

www.thephotoforum.com...

It took about 30 seconds to a minute to charge up if memory serves. You'd hear that high buildup frequency and then discharge when you flashed it.

Originally posted by CircleOfDust
There are simple empirical experiments we can do even as kids that show the absolute folly of most of modern science's reliance on faux mathematical smokescreen and mirror wizardry and hocus pocus nonsense to confuse the lay person out there.

They have to keep spinning more lies to keep their falsified version of reality going.

Rather ironic then that this very experiment is used as a teacher's example on the CERN website.
One would think if there was some kind of conspiratorial coverup in the laws of physics, that CERN would not go about asking people to perform this experiment.

But... you wouldnt be a member of the Flat Earth Society, would you?
They present the same argument that you assert, in much the same way.

reply to post by CircleOfDust


ok, cool. I have almost the exact model. It's a vivitar, bought in 1983
The reason I asked is because of the sound it makes when ramping up for the next discharge.
have you considered that the sound of the recharge cycle could have produced a sympathetic vibration in the cymbal?

Originally posted by CircleOfDust
Momentum w/o mass is impossible.

Photons have zero rest mass but they do have momentum. If you believe otherwise, I suggest it's not mainstream science that's wrong, but your understanding of it.

Photon

Later experiments showed that these light-quanta also carry momentum and, thus, can be considered particles: the photon concept was born...

Originally posted by alfa1
Rather ironic then that this very experiment is used as a teacher's example on the CERN website.

Good find, sounds identical to the OP experiment.

When I was growing up, I didn't have access to any cymbal, at least not at home. but I did have access to a shoe box, and somehow I ended up hearing a percussion effect when aiming the strobe flash at the shoe box. It made a sound sort of like a drum does when you beat it, though not as loud of course, but still pretty loud for just light hitting the box. That may have been part of the reason I studied physics in college, since I was fascinated by that "experiment".

After conducting an experiment related to the CircleOfDust's experiment, somehow I ended up on the other side of the fence, believing most of mainstream science, and supporting the scientific method, which gives me the opportunity to change the beliefs of the scientific community which I don't share, if I can come up with proof.

reply to post by spacedoubt


You've had a drum set before? Those cymbals are huge and thick, mon! I think it would be like blowing a dog whistle and expecting walls to shake.

reply to post by alfa1


Interesting thanks, but I discovered the test first when I was a kid...that's my story and I'm sticking to it...

Looks like they admit it has momentum. Fascinating.

But don't really care to be associated with Flat Earth.

reply to post by XL5


Interesting thought, thanks. I wish I had the materials to repeat it like that. But even the Cern website that was referenced says it's light's momentum.

reply to post by alfa1


It appears as if you've contradicted your own words in your next post.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


Awesome experiment. That kind of throws out the sound or heat aspect of it. Now we're down to whether light has mass. I hate to quote Wiki to your use of Wiki, because it's just like comparing one set of ignorant collection of data to another (Wiki is good for starters, but shouldn't be considered the all to end all or definitive by any means).


NO I changed my mind, no need to quote Wiki .. We all know this:

momentum is: mass + velocity

I guess that's why they came up with the term photon. To hide the fact that light has mass. Because according to Einstein's theory of relativity, it would then have infinite mass by going at its own light speed. derp.

Originally posted by CircleOfDust
NO I changed my mind, no need to quote Wiki .. We all know this:

momentum is: mass + velocity..... derp.

No that's not the formula for momentum, not even for objects with mass, which would be mass times velocity.
For photons:

scipp.ucsc.edu...

The momentum of photons is equal to Planck’s constant divided by the wavelength

As you can see, there's no mass in that formula, just wavelength and a constant.

To sort this out, I grabbed the calculator, did a bit of research and found...

1. According to this page, energy output of a typical photography studio strobe light in a single flash = 100 Joules.

2. I used Wolfram-Alpha to find that a photon of 500 nm wavelength (picking green as a middle color) has 3.973 x 10^-19 Joules.
So therefore, the total number of photons in 100 Joules is 2.52x10^20 photons.

3. Using the procedure on this page (and double checking with WolframAlpha) I find that each photon has a momentum of 1.34^-27 kg.m/s

4. Therefore, all those photons listed earlier have a total momentum of 0.00000034 kg.m/s or 0.00034grams.m/s

That is, if you take a tiny weight of only 0.00034 grams and move it at 1 meter per second towards the cymbal, thats the result.
Or a heavier weight of 0.34 grams and move it at a speed of 1 meter per 17 minutes (very slow) towards the cymbal, to crash into it.

Frankly, I dont think thats anywhere near enough to cause any sound that people are observing.
I think CERN is wrong, when they say that it is caused by photon momentum, and I'll go with the answer I gave in my first posting.

A very simple experiment that throws up a lot of interesting questions regarding the nature of light, and specifically its constituent...the photon.

Photons fired from a flashgun introduce energy upon a drum set cymbal to elicit a tone. At face value, it would suggest that photons have mass, but this mass has never been detected. So, how is a pulse of light managing to set a large enough vibration in a cymbal so that it perturbs the air around the cymbal for our ears to detect as a low tone?

If the photon has no mass, then congruently it has no nucleus, and thus, we cannot treat it as a 'solid' object colliding with another 'solid' object. The photon is the force carrier of electromagnetism, and what it lacks in mass, makes up for in momentum, yet without mass, how is a photon able to cause perturbation? The answer must lay in the way it is absorbed and emitted by the electron within the atom, and how that quantum action rigidly follows the law on the conservation of energy?

For the sake of illustration (and argument) I'll use the classical Rutherford-Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. A simplistic construct defining the atom as having a central positively-charged nucleus - the proton, and a single orbiting negatively-charged electron. Both particles have mass, with the proton being 2000 times heavier than the electron. While the proton is held in place by the strong nuclear force, the electron is held in its relationship to the proton by electrostatic force.

If an atom is at rest phase, its lowest energy level, and its electron absorbs a photon, an increase in the atom's energy value occurs, causing the electron to jump to a higher energy orbit. The atom cannot hold onto this increase of energy, so the electron emits a photon which allows the electron and the atom to return to rest phase. It is this jump from lower energy orbit to higher energy orbit back to lower energy orbit that supplies the energy causing the cymbal to resonate and perturb the air around it. Obviously, a single photon being absorbed by a single atom is not enough to cause a large enough resonance in the cymbal to perturb the air. It's down to the transfer of kinetic energy initially supplied by the momentum of the photons fired from the flashgun.

As well as being the fundamental building blocks of solids, atoms are essentially relay stations for pumping energy around, where every energy interaction breaks down the wave/particle duality into the everyday reality.

Closest I can find.



Packs a punch I'd say.

Originally posted by alfa1

To sort this out, I grabbed the calculator, did a bit of research and found...

1. According to this page, energy output of a typical photography studio strobe light in a single flash = 100 Joules.

The 100 joules has a duration of maybe 1/2000 second, so this is 200,000 watts!!!!

My stereo is only about 50 watts, and it's a lot louder, so the process is apparently relatively inefficient at producing sound relative to my stereo (a lot of the energy is reflected light, which is sort of the whole purpose of flash photography). Only a small amount of the 200,000 watts gets converted to sound.

Edit to add: before you dismiss your momentum figures (and I'm not saying momentum is the cause of the sound, but neither do I dismiss the possibility), consider the sensitivity of human hearing:

Crystal Radio

Early crystal sets could receive signals as weak as 2.5 nanowatts at the antenna. Crystal radios can receive such weak signals without using amplification only due to the great sensitivity of human hearing, which can detect sounds with an energy of only 10^-16 W/cm2.

I don't know the exact process by which the sound is created when photons strike a cymbal, but if someone has studied it and found a good explanation, I'd love to see it.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


maybe the cymbal is resonant to sonic waveforms outside of human hearing? the tiny dimpled surface could translate the hypersonic waves into a phonon, which can then be heard?

Originally posted by tgidkp
reply to post by Arbitrageur

 

maybe the cymbal is resonant to sonic waveforms outside of human hearing? the tiny dimpled surface could translate the hypersonic waves into a phonon, which can then be heard?

It would be fairly easy to test that. Draw a vacuum between two panes of glass and put the vacuum filled glass between the flash and the cymbal. If it's a sonic waveform the attenuation will be large. If it's photons the attenuation will be perhaps 4% per pane of glass or about 8%. I suspect it's got nothing to do with hypersonic waves.

I can hear two separate sounds, one from the flash itself, and one from the shoebox.

If it's not momentum, it's probably something like the rapid heating of the air for 1/2000 second next to the surface creating a shock wave that moves the surface (of the cymbal or shoebox), or it could even be some combination of something like that and momentum.