Funny Thing about Noise

The funny thing about noise is that we cannot live without it. Noise is unwanted sound but it appears that we need some noise, however slight an amount to stabilise the mind. Complete quiet is a sense deprivation that leaves us disoriented and even hallucinatory. The movement of leaves in a breeze, the faint ticking of a clock, the sound of trickling water is enough to establish a necessary background. It appears that a low background noise actually helps concentration analogous to shoes I read of recently which have a built in random movement in the sole that helps elderly people keep balance. One can achieve almost complete silence on a barren mountaintop or in an anechoic room. But there is still noise which can be detected with a sensitive microphone and amplified to a normal hearing range. And below the detection range of the sensitive microphone there is other noise which could be detected with an even more sensitive microscope.

Besides audible noise there are other forms of noise, especially electrical noise. If you tune an am radio between stations and turn up the volume you will hear a hissing noise that derives from the mingling of leakage from all manner of electrical appliances and electrical storms in the atmosphere. This takes many forms, white noise, pink noise, shot noise, Gaussian noise and others that are the bane of communications. If you point a sensitive antenna to the sky you can pick up galactic noise and even extra galactic noise. One of the strangest of noises is the background noise throughout the universe that is the remnant of the Big Bang that began our cosmos. We would not have evolved at all without noise, random events of radiation which changed the genetic structure on which natural selection could operate to evolve all living creatures.

There is a most mysterious noise of all called quantum noise. Noise is related to random movement, which is related to temperature. It was expected that at zero temperature there would be zero movement and hence zero noise. But this is not so, zero noise is an impossibility; there always remains what is called zero level noise which is not actually zero. And here is the ultimate mystery. There is a famous equation which tells us that a tiny quantity of energy can exist spontaneously for a tiny length of time without its requiring a source or a cause, other than what is a vast reservoir of zero level noise. It happens that if the tiny quantity of energy is reduced the tiny quantity of time can grow longer. And now suppose that the tiny quantity of energy becomes unimaginably small. Then the quantity of time can be very, very long. Einstein’s famous equation
E = mc2
tells us that matter m and energy E are interchangeable. So we can rephrase a recent sentence to say: Suppose that a tiny quantity of matter becomes unimaginably small. Then the quantity of time can be very, very long. Is our whole universe such a tiny quantity of matter which exists for a very, very long time? But, you will say, our whole universe, stars, planets, inter stellar gas, galaxies, inter galactic matter, is unimaginably large, not unimaginably small. However, negative matter has been theoretically predicted and observed. What if the unimaginably vast amount of matter consists of equal amounts of positive matter and negative matter? Then the two together add up to zero, and zero means an unimaginably small amount! In which case we ourselves and the whole vast universe can be a bubble of noise, a bubble of matter in a bubble of time!
Funny thing about noise.