While the energy in your voice bubble falls off rapidly with distance, this is not the case for the infrared bubble created by your voice. The infrared energy created by the sound of your voice propagates independently of air (remember that electromagnetism does not need a medium to travel in), and heat is not significantly attenuated by air particles.
Therefore, the infrared bubble travels relatively unimpeded through the atmosphere to outer space, where theory tells us it will travel forever4 unless it encounters some dense matter. So, your words and songs should, one day, reach the stars.
At this point, you might be wondering, if we can sing to the stars, shouldn’t the stars be able to sing to us? The stars do indeed bathe the Earth in their ‘song’.
The same principle that transcribes our vocalized sounds to modulated infrared light (colliding atoms that create heat and carry sonic modulations) is also occurring in stars, and the stars are radiating their “songs” across the Universe in both the infrared and visible light spectrums.
A branch of astronomy called asteroseismology5 is one in which scientists ‘listen in’ to the sounds of stars. Sounds created within the heart of a star can provide important data regarding the processes at work in its atomic furnace. By studying the ‘music’ of stars, it has also become possible to discover exoplanets, in some cases planets that resemble Earth in size and distance from the parent star. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in December 2021, is designed to monitor the heavens primarily in the infrared spectrum and with astonishing sensitivity.
Perhaps the JWST or some even more sensitive instrument of the future may one day listen in to extra-terrestrial life, not by a signal deliberately transmitted into space but one born of sounds that created infrared light. Or perhaps if there is an ocean on a remote alien planet, the James Webb telescope may one day listen to the sounds of its waves crashing onto the shore. And where there is liquid water, there may well be life.
Most people remain blissfully unaware that our words and songs are rushing into space as modulated infrared light. Maybe someday, the words or songs you utter today will be heard by non-human ears in a galaxy far, far away.
Read Part Two next month in the
March 2024 issue of Masters of Health Magazine.
For information on John’s pioneering research and his impressive CymaScope Shop where the wonderful world of sound is made visible in a magical and compelling way, go to https://cymascope.com/.