[OT -ish] Sound In Space

Lieutenant Hudson stared at his consoles, mesmerized. Pulse torpedoes
streaked through space leaving a yellow trail on the tactical display. A
large red dot that was the FSE's Bonaparte sat in the middle of the
screen. Though the torpedoes and the capital ship were moving towards a
collision, only the torpedoes appeared to be moving, as if sucked in by
the ship's gravity well.

Hudson shifted to the visual view. The torpedoes hit. Even at more than
two kilometres away, the flare was bright enough that the screen
compensated, momentarily dulling the image. The ship, already crippled,
began to spew florescent waste in a crack in her hull. The Bonaparte's
hull began to glow red. Hudson's eyes widened before he instinctively --
and needlessly -- turned away from the screen.

The compensators kicked in as the monitor flared bright white. A
simultaneous high-pitched sizzling cascaded through the NAC Vimy Ridge,
followed by a sharp crack and another flare.

"What was that?" cried the ensign sitting beside Hudson.

"Cascade failure. She lost her warp core." Hudson turned back to the
screen. The sizzling sound was disipating, but there were a couple of
sharp cracks as core collapsed on itelf. In a few seconds, all that was
left of the Bonaparte was a torrent of sparkling dust and a receding
ball of plasma.

---

Okay, the scientific among you will look at the above and chuckle.
Obviously the work of some hack ignorant of science, right? First off,
there can be no sound in space. Second, even if there was, sound travels
slower than light (assuming that it's propogating through a gas).
There's no way that even in a non-vacuum state that the sound of the
explosion could have carried at the same speed as the image.

Well... perhaps there is. I read an interesting article on
http://www.space.com about something called electrophonic sound.

It's a rare phenomenon, but now fairly well documented. People have
reported hearing the sound of meteors streaking through the sky above
them and have heard the meteors die as they burn up in the atmosphere.
However, there is no time delay between what they saw and what they
heard. Scientists, of course, scoffed for over a century, but there is
now enough evidence to support this.

Basically, there are enough megawatts of energy in a meteor's descent
through the atmosphere that it gives off low-frequency radiation. This
radiation then, in turn, causes objects on the ground to vibrate. This
can be anything from eyeglasses to dental fillings to pine needles to
the observer's hair. The reason for the sound appearing to happen
instantaneously is because the vibration occurs in objects close to the
observer.

When I heard about this, I thought it would make an interesting filler
in science fiction novels. Movies have, for a long time, added sound in
space just to make it more interesting. Now it appears there could be a
scientific reason for it. The Death Star may explode with a thunderous
roar, but the roar is more likely to be a sharp crack, and more than
likely to come from Luke's crash helmet and visor than the Death Star
itself.

I thought the list would find this interesting. Here's the URL to the
full story:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/electrophonic_sound_00
0706.html

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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