Saturday, February 18, 2006
Sound Frozen in Ancient Pottery - Not!
Many years ago Thomas Alva Edison made his name (or one of them) by focusing sound onto a needle and then using that to etch a vibrating groove into wax. He recognized that the sound pressure could move the needle and create a trail that would replay the source sound.
In the mid 90's someone suggested it might be possible to read back sounds traced as one leaf rubbed onto the wax of another, during the dinosaur era, and fossilized. I never found a followup reference to that. But keep an eye on the leaf fossils one sees for the telltale grooves.
Late today with Google I found a site that has a series of postings from the late 90's Mad Science sound + pottery where the author poo-poo'd the idea as being impossible due to the crude material the grooves might be cut into. Hmmm. But he did refer to an original article published in a 1965 Feb 6th New Scientist at a Russian language site, where the idea was fleshed out.
The original trigger to this discovery process was earlier today, when I found on the news aggregator site DIGG an article on a Belgian TV station showing a brief presentation from some archaelogists showing the grooves in pots from ancient Pompeii. When analysed with cameras and computers reading the surface as one would play an analog record, the grooves are shown to contain audio information. The article was in French, but the impression I got was that there were latin words, followed by laughter, trapped in the surface of the hand thrown clay pot. The scientists converted the vibrations into sound for playback and I was impressed and moved. Our ancestors, at least, cousins of my ancestors, were there. Our connection to the past.
Sound frozen in pottery clay
-- alas, like all far fetched items this above reference turns out to have been made up for April fools in 2005. Here is the reference that expounds on this notion:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002875.html
April fools 2005
Link
posted by Nick 9:21:00 PM
