I’ve been looking at different complex systems lately; I’m becoming more and more fascinated with a term called “Emergence”. It’s when you perceive a complex and beautiful pattern from a huge amount of individual, simple objects guided by simple rules.

You see this in flocking birds, insect swarms, ant colonies, blizzards, etc… . Long wispy filaments and diaphanous undulating clouds, complex subterranean architecture and in sheets of rain or snow, even consciousness could be an emergent pattern given the simple actions of individual neurons, and the overwhelming complexity of a central nervous system. It’s all around us, inescapable, and inexhaustible in the never-ending fractile of nature.

But one place I haven’t seen the beauty of all these complex systems is in the crappy 1940′s to 1990′s era television snow. That is, until now. This humble and annoying side effect of technology can be as majestic as a perfect night sky if you understand what you’re looking at.

So what is television snow?

Now-a-days most, if not all viewing devices, filter out the background static of bad reception, and instead display a relaxing, and often blinding, blue screen; but reaching back into my childhood I remember the infamous television snow and white noise that accompanied my two channels of cathode ray escapism. I lived way out in the country, so the two channels we did get had spotty reception at best. Leaving the rest of the channels open to receive messages from beyond.

What causes it?

Now here’s where it gets cool. Background radiation. But not just any background radiation, like from the mantle of the Earth or from the Sun, this stuff is as old as time itself and is known as “Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation” left over from the big bang.

What’s it doing on our old TVs?

As it turns out, if you’re a ray of light traveling through empty space, the further you travel away from other forms of matter, the more stretchy and floppy space becomes. So as you travel through these vast intergalactic distances you become all stretched out as well. As it so happens, the big bang, as you can imagine, was unbelievably energetic; so energetic in fact that the gamma rays coming out of it caused most of the matter in the early universe to fly at almost the speed of light itself.

Since we perceive the observable outer edge of the universe to be about 13 billion light years away, it’s light has become all floppy and less energetic. It’s only coincidence that it happens to be stretched out to roughly the same frequency our television stations use to broadcast Three’s Company reruns.

So, what’s so beautiful about random static?

What you see as crappy reception is actually the outermost ripple in the endless cosmic pond. Silent and ever expanding into the void. It’s sole effect is tearing apart dimensions within the vacuum and creating our reality one quantum super string at a time.

The problem with our old TV sets is that they don’t supply a big enough window to see the true majesty of what we’re witnessing. Instead of watching a distant tornado slowly descend toward the ground and start kicking up debris, we instead see only the debris, flying straight at our heads. Not very pretty, but take a step back and watch it dance across the country side.

Perspective my friends, that’s all it takes to see the beauty in television snow.

Resembling a palates ball with robotic spider legs, partially encased in concrete at the center of this huge facility, the reaction chamber is a rather intimidating looking blue sphere surrounded by portholes, and large long rectangular boxes all converging into a single point somewhere deep within the bowels of this megalithic construction. It’s hard to believe that all of this is needed to convert a 2 millimeter sphere of beryllium and deuterium into helium and a butt-load of energy.

Sleeping in the giant belly of the Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility, is the world’s first over unity nuclear fusion laser reactor (ignition scheduled for 2010). It’s expected that the overall energy output from this reactor will be anywhere between 100 to 1000 times the energy that was needed to start the initial fusion reaction. That would be equivalent to the entire electrical output of the United States power grid combined, for a billionth of a second.

A brief history of laser fusion:

This monumental effort represents the 4th attempt to achieve a fusion reaction at the facility over the past 35 years. The first was codenamed “Janus” in 1974. With an output of only 10 joules and built to study inertial confinement fusion it was considered to be a very high power laser. Utilizing almost 100 pounds of Neodymium² glass laser material, and filling a medium sized room, the dual infrared laser didn’t have enough power to create a fusion reaction.

Although fusion was not achieved in the Janus experiment, some serious number crunching led to the second attempt at laser fusion in 1977 codenamed “Shiva”. Named after the multi-armed Hindu goddess of destruction, this laser system, at the time, certainly lived up to it’s name. Utilizing 20 infrared lasers, this system was capable of generating 10.2 KiloJoules of energy (over 1000 times the energy of it’s predecessor). Fusion was not expected in this facility, it was built primarily as a proof of concept for a larger facility that was to follow.

In 1984 “Nova” came online with the expressed purpose of becoming the first fusion ignition system. With 20 beamlines and an output of 30 KiloJoules this system should have had the power to spark a fusion reaction. Ultimately it failed due to unforeseen magnetohydrodynamic instability, and minute inconsistencies in the laser outputs causing the fuel pellet to heat and implode unevenly. Although fusion was not achieved, the data collected during it’s operation between 1984 and 1999, proved to be both valuable and vital in the fields of high-density matter physics and nuclear weapons research.

After some major plans to upgrade the Nova systems, they were eventually rented to France and replaced by the “National Ignition Facility”. Now taking up the full space of both the Janus and Nova facilities, and incorporating 192 ultraviolet lasers and over 3,000 plates of Neodymium doped laser glass, this latest incarnation puts out an incredible 1.8 Million joules of energy making it almost 200, 000 times more powerful than the Janus experiment.

Now that’s one a-spicy meat-a-ball!

Footnotes:

¹In chemistry and manufacturing, electrolysis is a method of separating chemically bonded elements and compounds by passing an electric current through them. One important use of electrolysis of water is to produce hydrogen.

²Neodymium is also known as a “rare earth metal”, and has a wide array of uses from high power laser glass doping to super strong permanent magnets.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/05/gallery_nif

Sandia’ Z machine lab melts diamonds at 10 million atmospheres

Heavy super-dense deuterium atoms are the nuclear fuel of the future

I was watching the Leonid Meteor shower in 2001 on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island. It was cold, quiet and a site to behold. I was on a small outcropping of rock above an eerily still ocean, with my back to a dense forest of Jack Pines. The meteors were streaking in sometimes several times a minute, and were nothing more than faint streaking points of light, while the larger bolides cut huge celestial gashes across the early morning sky, leaving long, brief, luminous trails of plasma in their wake.

I noticed that I could actually hear the bolides, as soon as I saw them. You would expect  a thunderous rumble or some sort of a sonic-boom, however the sounds we heard were more like “fizzing” or a metallic sounding “crackle” like a wet branch covered in guitar strings, in a bonfire. At the time I didn’t question it, but then I started thinking, ‘those meteors are hundreds of kilometers away in the upper atmosphere, how is the sound getting to my ears almost instantly?’. Given all I knew about the speed of sound versus the speed of light in my experience with thunderstorms and fireworks, it didn’t seem to make any sense at all.

For every three seconds that pass after a lightening strike, you can count roughly 1 km until you hear the thunder. So if the time between flash and rumble is 6 seconds, you know the strike was roughly 2 km away. Following this logic, if the distorted sonic-boom of a streaking bolide occurs 150-300 km away, you would expect to hear the sound between 7.5 – 15 minutes after you see the streak.

So, the sounds I heard, or thought I heard, were nothing more than my overactive imagination, mixed with a trick of visual and audio paradolia perhaps? No? It turns out, as with anything witnessed, but seemingly impossible to explain, there is a very complicated and cool explanation for what we experienced that night.

Geophysical Electrophonics… I know it sounds like a term pulled from the butt of a cheesy sci-fi movie, but it actually exists.

Turns out, according to a guy named Colin Keay, the super-heated and charged plasma trails caused by large bolides actually tear through the earth’s magnetic field, causing it to stretch out into spaghetti like filaments before they snap, sending Very Low Frequency (VLF) EM waves down to the earth at the speed of light. When these low frequency EM waves hit random debris in the environment, (pine needles, leaves, even hair lightly touching your glasses) they induce a slight kinetic resonant vibration in the debris and create a sound at an audible level. Effectively turning random loosely dispersed environmental conditions into transducers. You can find more precise transducers in your technofile life style, in the forms of speakers and microphones.

Microwaving your head for science…

Geophysical Electrophonics is related to the Microwave Auditory Effect also known as the Frey Effect, named after Allan H. Frey, an American neuroscientist known for his research and writing during the Cold War on the nature of the microwave auditory effect.

In World War II, some Radar Technicians working around the equipement would often hear high pitched wistles, hums or crackling sounds that weren’t apparent to the other people working just a few feet away. Turns out the people being affected in this way were actually wandering through microwave hot spots near the machinery, causing their experience.

The effect was better explained by a study conducted by NASA in the 70′s. They found that shorter wavelength portions of the electromagnetic spectrum can cause thermal expanding to parts of the inner ear, in and around the cochlea, which sets up a direct vibration in the fluid of the inner ear that stimulates hearing. Apparently you can get this effect even with very low doses of this radiation. Further to this process, and much neater, if you take these EM waves and modulate them slightly like you would radio waves, you can actually turn those random crackles into words and tones without the need for the person to wear any additional hardware. All the sounds are created inside the person’s inner ear.

Naturally, the technology for this type of communication would be rather difficult to refine, due to the possible dangers of using Microwaves on people. I can imagine that loudly saying hello to your friend or turning up the volume would mean a rather uncomfortable, and awkward trip to the burn unit for everyone involved. But still, there are some aspects of this technology creeping it’s way into the military.

In 2006 some non-lethal weaponry that exploits this effect was declassified in the USA. In 2008 a company called the Sierra Nevada Corporation announced that they would be bulding a weapon called MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), as a way to bring more non-lethal weaponry into the military. It’s a neat idea, but according to some scientists at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, far from cooking people, it just causes crippling sound. But it they would be more worried about any lasting neurological damage that would occure from using such a weapon.

Nerves are extraordinarily fragile. When you start dealing with higher frquency radiation reactions in the body, our nervous systems aren’t naturally equipped to deal with the side effects, such as thermal nerve damage. I for one fully endorse the exploration and the use of non-lethal weaponry, however, we had better make damn sure that we aren’t causing more harm that good if we decide to release this type of weaponry on violent or peaceful crowds of people.