What Gravitational Waves Sound Like: New Audio of Black Holes Colliding Confirms Predictions Einstein Made 100 Years Ago

Of course, grav­i­ta­tion­al waves don’t make a sound. Sound is air waves, not waves of the fab­ric of exis­tence flex­ing.

Fre­quen­cies from one type of wave can be mapped over onto anoth­er type of wave, though, which has been done here. Why map it onto sound rather than light? Why not make an image?

That’s a good ques­tion that you might be able to sense an answer to intu­itive­ly, and might want to think about for sec­ond, but the answer can be found at this better(I’m sor­ry to say) announce­ment of the find­ing: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-is-what-a-gravitational-wave-sounds-like

That answer is: “Unlike light waves, which prop­a­gate wave­lengths that are small­er than the object that emits them, grav­i­ta­tion­al rip­ples pro­duce wave­lengths larg­er than the objects that pro­duce them. In that way, they are more anal­o­gous to acoustic ener­gy than elec­tro­mag­net­ic ener­gy, so record­ing them is usu­al­ly con­sid­ered akin to record­ing rather than light.”

When sci­en­tists are mak­ing an anal­o­gy, even a close anal­o­gy like this “sound” record­ing of waves that aren’t sound, it’s impor­tant to keep track of the anal­o­gy, instead of tak­ing it lit­er­al­ly. The whole point here is to think about this, not to shrug off think­ing and just lis­ten to the pret­ty sound.

Well, I hap­pen to like the pret­ty sound, even though it’s not real. And I don’t shrug off think­ing about what it rep­re­sents.

For us lay­men, who don’t know the intri­ca­cies of the physics involved, but are still able to be awed by our Uni­verse (both the out­ward and the inward), demon­stra­tions like this help me grasp (what lit­tle I can, that is ) the awe­some & incred­i­ble work­ings of the immen­si­ty of our real­i­ty.