Weird...
| Curtis |
Wednesday, December 4, 2002 at 10:40 PM |
Okay, so I was reading this article about a sonic refrigerater... Really, it cools things using sound, but that's not the weird part.
It requires sounds of 173 dB to operate, which is really, really, really loud. By comparison, standing next to the speakers at a rock concert is around 120 dB, which is loud enough to cause physical pain. But here's the weird part, quoting directly from the article (from BBC News)...
"Sounds of 165 dB would cause a person's hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion."
Cool! Man I would love to see that. Well, except for the obvious danger posed to the subject by flaming hair, not to mention what else sound that loud would do to the human body.
But I have to wonder, okay, hair catches on fire at 165 dB - so who was the first to discover this fact? There's got to be a story there somewhere...
