Would you just stop interrupting videos with your sponsors? They're only making your videos less watchable if we have to deal with the tonal whiplash of the sponsor right in the middle. Either discuss your sponsors at the beginning of the video or at the end.
Err, no, it didn't blow itself to bits. No volcano does. What happens is that the volcano erupts so much material that it empties, or partially empties it's 'magma chamber'. (Which may not be an actual chamber, but loads and loads of little pockets of melted rock). What happens then is that the rocks that make up the volcano collapse into the empty spaces left by the erupted material. This can happen so quickly it seems like the volcano blew itself up... an illusion made to seem all the more real as the collapse of the volcano releases pressure on the remaining magma, and creates easy pathways to the surface, causing the eruption to intensify further... If you're watching SciShow, you might like GeologyHUb's channel. He explores all kinds of geology stuff, including volcanic eruptions, meteorite impacts and so on. He also does a weekly volcano related news report, which is very interesting.
The barometer that detected the equivalent of 173 decibels from Krakatau (Krakatoa is a typo that stuck) actually maxed out. The actual pressure was higher.
Yeah I was thinking Tunguska. Those shockwaves were picked up around the world. The 2013 Chelyabinsk shockwave also shattered windows, damaged over 7000 buildings and caused more than 1500 injuries from 18 miles up in the atmosphere. Meteorite (or comet) impacts (even air blasts) generate far more explosive energy than a volcano ever could. That kind of thing could happen again at any time.
"Far more explosive energy than a volcano ever could" okay so this is technically true because space rocks don't have a size limit (other than the point they start glowing and become brown dwarfs, at which point they're a verifiable rock-star hybrid (haha, rockstar)), but that's not really what's being discussed. You are literally making this argument on a video about a volcano that made a sound wave the size of North America. You are making this claim, not about planet-killer asteroids but about events like Chelyabinsk, on a video about a volcanic event that makes Chelyabinsk look like a left-cheek-sneak (that's a term for a concealed fart in my family). I do understand the point, but... there's something to be said for contextual appropriateness, not just technical correctness. Using Chelyabinsk as your example did not make the point you thought lol and made you sound incorrect. If you'd have mentioned Chicxulub, that would have made more sense.
And yes, it could happen with less warning than most volcanic explosions, but 1) there are freak volcanic explosions that don't give significant warning, and 2) the bigger the asteroid, the better the chances are that we see it coming. If I'm not mistaken the Tunguska [asteroid? Meteorite? Comet? Eh... object] came from the direction of the Sun such that we couldn't see it for the glare. But that's a minimum of events.
Explosions don't *generate* energy, they *release* it. Also, your comparison makes no sense, and is largely irrelevant. Volcanos are limited by the size of whatever lump they are on, while meteorites can go higher by being larger *and* faster, but at some point you get apocalypse level events anyway, and both have happened. Although, there has to be a point at which a "meteorite" becomes something larger, such as a planet.
We found that the loudness of a toddler was proportional to the length of silence between to time it stubbed its toe to when it started screaming!🤭 Short time, oh, there there there. Long time...awaiting Krakatoa!🤣
@@RichardIresonMusician Yeah, that breath reload time is critical to loudness. If it's more than 2 seconds it is recommended to call for backup immediately.
As a Food4Less employee, and therefore a Kroger employee, this thread kills me 😂 supermarket workers dgaf, don't worry haha. But this does remind me of the time I, as a young child in the checkout line with my mom, watched her swipe her debit card, watched closely as she typed in 4 numbers into a little keypad, and then proceeded to read those 4 little personalized numbers *VERY LOUDLY TO THE WHOLE LINE* 😂
@@DavidPumpernickel well, dense packing in materials does cause their speed of sound to increase, to be fair. I'm sure that totally accounts for the difference and makes your fact unremarkable 😂 kidding, obviously
Most people think a fire engine siren sound travels miles, but as a fire engine and ambulance operator, I can attest that the siren is nearly silent to 99% of anyone in my lane.
Is the fact that today is the anniversary of Chuck Yeager in a Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier for the first time a coincident? sounds like good timing
I was in a very quiet place and had been so for a while. Silent the whole time ... I read the title, clicked it, realized my phone was on full volume and jumped thinking ... "THIS!! THIS IS THE LOUDEST NOISE!!!!"
Well, once you know what the reference pressure is, you know the actual pressure. It is an absolute measurement. It's just that the pressure values are so small, and cumbersome, decibels are used as a mathematical convenience. In air the reference pressure is 20 micropascals, in water it's 1 micropascal, so one has to be careful comparing sound levels in air and water.
There was a reddit thread (peacock feathers I think) that devolved into arguments about the definition of sound. Don't feel bad about trying, there's just a ton of unqualified "experts" roaming around.
I got teary-eyed watching a lot of this. This time didn't last long and ended abruptly. I miss this. Great video man and you had a great idea in making this. Thanks for sharing
Given other huge sounds, it would have gone around the planet dozen times. Probably deafened everything it didn't kill on that third of the planet. Shock wave then huge sound.
i knew it! i knew this was gonna be the famous krakatoa incident lol i heard that the sound waves from that were estimated to have traveled the earth more than twice, and ruptured the eardrums of nearby sailors who then went on to write about the coming end of the world in their journals afterward lol
Very interesting. I never knew until now about the 194 dB limit. Imagine what the shockwave was like when Theia hit the Earth and the moon was formed : I feel that that must have been the loudest bang ever to occur on earth. The noise would be the last of your worries though, given that the earth was still molten and the 'atmosphere' was mainly hydrogen 😅. Looking forward to your next video!
It doesn't have to be extremely loud to travel that distance. It has to have these 3 characteristics: 1. The source of the sound (lets call it the membrane) has to be big... And what's bigger than a volcano. 2. The frequency (the wavelenght of the shock blast) must be low enough. And that is dictated by the membrane size and the speed of the blast. 3. The right atmospheric conditions, such as a temperature inversion layer, which would trap the sound wave and keep it between the atmosphere and the ocean surface. And temperature inversions happen all the time above the oceans. Especially at the time of the Krakatoa event.
@@gabbysmith7579The water absorbs some of the _absurd_ amounts of sound energy produced by rocket engines, preventing that energy damaging launchpad infrastructure, etc. - or at least _reducing_ the damage. *Edit:* see Wikipedia's "Sound suppression system" article for more info :)
For all the talk about dB, I'm surprised you didn't go through the dBa vs dBc at least briefly. It would've seemed like an effective talk to get your point across about dBa vs dBc response graph, and how we use those measurements to determine sound intensity.
Astrophysicist here who specials in asteroids and planetary defense! This seems like such a small thing, but thank you SO MUCH for discussing Tunguska correctly. There is an *incorrect* overestimate of the number of trees that the shockwave flattened, propagated by almost 100 years of misinformation. Throughout so many sources, both in-print and online, the estimated number of fallen trees is incorrectly quoted as 80 million. This number is *now* estimated as a factor of 4 too high (Boslough, GSA Connects 2024). From a very niche corner of the research world: thank you for not quoting this false estimate of 80 million trees! SciShow continues to rock.
I found in a search of newspapers published at the time articles that mention of people hearing the sound of what they thought was canon fire. Fascinating stuff.
The Republic XF-84H "Thunderscreech" was a pretty loud supersonic propeller powered plane, it made something like 900 sonic booms a second and could be heard at least 30 miles away. It was so loud that one of the test pilots told the flight crew that none of them were big enough and there weren't enough of them to force him to go back into that plane.
I know it wasn't the loudest sound ever heard, however, it was the loudest sound I've ever heard... I was standing outside, just in front of my office, when a bomb exploded approximately 50 feet away. (Maybe 50-75 feet away) The shock wave physically pushed me backward against the building I was standing near. It felt like a giant hand had backhanded me, not quite sending me flying backward. The sound of the explosion made my ears ring for more than a month. The crater where the bomb landed was shocking small, no more than about 3 feet in diameter & about 2 feet deep. It irreparably damaged a couple dozen vehicles in the lot where it landed. I was second closest to the bomb, a couple of guys were in the lot inspecting vehicles & were only about 30-40 feet away from the impact. They survived by diving behind the dual wheels on a large trailer. That probably saved their lives. They heard the bomb coming in, only seconds before it hit. Another guy was about as close as I was & I've never seen anybody run so fast, before or since. We were used to being bombed almost daily. We developed a dark, graveyard sense of humor about it because 'they' usually couldn't hit the broad side of a huge barn. (So to speak)
If you were standing next to that bat, emitting deafening levels of ultrasound... even though you can't perceive the sound, would the pressure waves still damage your hearing?
The physical limit of pressure waves in solids is the point at which the intermolecular bonds would break. This is also known as when that glass cup hits the floor.
@@richardl6751 fyi… loudness is generally measured as dB-SPL. Sound Pressure Level (SPL) has units of pressure such as Pascals (Pa) and is measured at a point in space. dB-SPL = 20*log10(SPL/SPLref), where normally SPLRef = 20 microPascals (μPa). Sound Power (Watts) is the total amount of energy radiated by an acoustical source, integrated over a closed surface such as a sphere. Sound power in dB follows 10*log10 (P2/P1).
Right. A correct but (hopefully) clear statement could be "Ten decibels higher means ten times more intense, but twenty decibels higher means a hundred times more intense."
5:25 ".. when a sound doubles in loudness, it is 10 times more intense" That's exactly missing the point of logarithmic: That is just linear not logarihtmic. 2*x=10*y => x= 5 y. What you want to point out is exponential: One step louder means double intensity: 1,2,4,8,16, ... The inverse function of the exponential funktion is the logarithm. So if the intesity doubles, we hear it as just "one step louder".
You’ve not accurately represented what was said here - what was said was given in terms of a prior reference that both properties are a function of. Both of these things should be expressed as a function of increments to the same reference value. Every additional ten dB (one Bel) of SPL (sound pressure level) is a tenfold increase in intensity and is roughly perceived as twice as loud. An increase of 20 dB SPL is thus 100 times as intense as and 4 times louder than the reference value. The ratio has squared - the relationship is exponential, not linear, and is exactly as was described in the video. When sound is perceived to double in loudness, it has intensified by a factor of ten. Loudness is actually much more complicated than that, but that’s a good general rule of thumb.
@@wholehandedly Sorry but I insist on 2*x=10*y is a linear relation, not an exponentional one. That was said in the video -- and that is wrong when it comes to percieved lodness. You also miss the fact that a linear step of an arbitrary "one" in one scale means a doubling in the other one -- which is the key to an exonential behaviour. That's why we use dB (decibel) "Bel" means we use the decadic logarithm of the relation to a reference value. "deci" just means the tenth of a unit. Please don't make it more complicated than it is: Human senses (also brightness or the perception of numbers) are mostly logarithmic. Things like frequency filters like the A scale in dB(A) are a different story like the different sensitivity of the eye to different wavelength.
@@f.herumusu8341 I didn’t say your equation wasn’t linear. I said it didn’t accurately describe the stated relationship. “When a sound is perceived as twice as loud, it is actually ten times as intense” explicitly implies that when a sound is 2^n times as loud as a given reference sound, it is 10^n times as intense as said reference.
Since they mentioned soundwaves under water! Sonar uses this principle to detect objects that reflect the soundwave that the vessel sent out. To get higher accuracies, sonars can pump more energy into these soundwaves to get more of a reflection back. Military vessels have sonars so powerful that diving next to one when it goes off would kill someone or at the very least heavily injure them.
(And if you *can't* 'get organised' no matter how many classes or paper organisers you try, then please get tested for ADHD. 'Laziness' is often thrown around at people with learning disabilities. Sometimes other people do actually just find life easier than you do. You're still a person worth just as much as them. Medications can help, but not everyone chooses to take them, they're recommended to be taken with talking therapies anyway, and even just the diagnosis can help. Plus the testing is interesting for introspection regardless of result.)
Question!! Born-deaf people that gain some hearing later in life often say that they thought the sun would make noise. So...does the sun make noise on a register we can't detect?
The sound is a constantly occuring nuclear explosion millions of times stronger than the nukes we have on earth Yes, it's loud We don't hear it because there's no air in space the sound can travel through
@@Obskewrial probably a conversion of light to sound, but I'm sure someone had done that. I don't think we've sent a probe into the sun with a microphone, but I could be wrong.
As this an educational video I would like to add something: dB is just a number, a ratio. As mentioned in the video, for it to "mean" something on its own we need a reference point. As soon as we do that we should make clear what reference point is used in order to avoid confusion. There are lots of common suffixes for this (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#List_of_suffixes). I guess what is described here (after the introduction to dB where simply the ratio is meant) is most likely dB(A) or dBA (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting). This confused me a lot, and still does, when I come in contact with dB values. Especially in acoustics it's often very unclear what is meant exactly as oftentimes only "dB" is used even though a ratio to a known fixed point is meant (like dBA).
Fun fact: our hearing is *not* the most sensitive at 1 kHz. It's just a nice round number. The actual sensitivity peak is around 3 kHz. TBF, it's not off by a ton, only like 3 dB.
The magma chamber breaking/collapsing is what caused the boom. The Earth, cracking very loudly, and shearing off a chunk of itself. There is a short story film documentary about a Dutch family that survived Krakatoa on Sumatra. They lost their baby, but the rest just survived. Bodies washed up on the African coast a year later, from Krakatoa.
Highly recommend Simon Winchester book Krakatoa, with science and world news highlighted. Krakatoa explosion announced the start of news spreading fast via telegraph to vast parts of the planet. Modern media arrived with a bang. Thanks to SciShow for a great discussion of big sound.
1883 Krakatoa still gets all this wonderment for being heard 3,000 miles away on Rodriguez Island... Like are we just going to pretend Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai wasn't heard and recorded 6,000 miles away all over Alaska in 2022?!?!
This. Not a single mention of HHTH being heard over ten thousand kilometers away in _Yukon, Canada_ ? Like, whether or not it was louder than Krakatoa _close up,_ it's definitely the furthest away sound to ever be heard by a human (that we have records of).
10:38 - 11:09Wow, a shockwave so powerful it wrapped around the planet multiple times! The Krakatoa explosion truly redefined what we think of as 'loud'. This makes me wonder what other unimaginable forces are out there in the universe!
I think there's an aspect missing in the analysis--the size of the shock wave. Something close to a point source will produce sound that falls roughly with the square of the distance but as the size of the source increases, it will get closer and closer to linear with distance. I'm not smart enough to figure out all the details but I imagine it would have something to do with how large the shock wave was, in other words, how far the exploding gasses managed to keep pushing the air at supersonic velocities.
For sound waves, intensity (energy per unit area) increases with amplitude. However, a large object can produce more total energy simply due to its size, even with low-amplitude waves. In this case, the sound spreads over a larger area, resulting in high overall energy but relatively low intensity and decibel level at any given point.
Hou need to take frequency into account when talking about distance. As lower frequency at lower decibels can be heard from further away, while higher frequencies dont travel as far.
In first hearing (without seeing) this video, I thought Penn Jillette was doing voice over work for SciShow. Then, I thought this guy sounds like Penn Jillette. Finally, I landed on my current theory: Penn Jillette is doing voice-over in this video, and this guy (who looks like he could have Penn's voice) is lip syncing.
The first 500 people to use my link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare skl.sh/scishow10241
Would you just stop interrupting videos with your sponsors? They're only making your videos less watchable if we have to deal with the tonal whiplash of the sponsor right in the middle. Either discuss your sponsors at the beginning of the video or at the end.
Could you use the inclusive pronoun "our" link? You're a team :)
@@JesusMartinez-rr2rydid you know there is skip ahead button?
isn't skillshare already proven to be garbage, abusive & maliciously deceptive platform?
@JesusMartinez-rr2ry so you think the content creator controls advertising? He gets paid, contracts have stipulations.
IIRC, Krakatoa didn't just erupt, it LITERALLY exploded - like, the entire volcano blew itself to bits. That's why it was so loud.
And not for the first time either. It went off during the reign of the Emperor Justinian somewhere in the 500's CE.
Sometimes volcanoes do that. they literally just explode because too much pressure builds up underground for a "normal" eruption to happen.
Err, no, it didn't blow itself to bits. No volcano does. What happens is that the volcano erupts so much material that it empties, or partially empties it's 'magma chamber'. (Which may not be an actual chamber, but loads and loads of little pockets of melted rock). What happens then is that the rocks that make up the volcano collapse into the empty spaces left by the erupted material. This can happen so quickly it seems like the volcano blew itself up... an illusion made to seem all the more real as the collapse of the volcano releases pressure on the remaining magma, and creates easy pathways to the surface, causing the eruption to intensify further...
If you're watching SciShow, you might like GeologyHUb's channel. He explores all kinds of geology stuff, including volcanic eruptions, meteorite impacts and so on. He also does a weekly volcano related news report, which is very interesting.
that was directly stated in the video.
I have trouble remembering that far back.
I went down this rabbit hole when I saw an air horn advertised at 500 decibels on Amazon. Enough sound to destroy space and time 😂
That's a weapon
I swear it’s 1.1k to destroy the universe not 500, something to do with estimated above what merger or black holes would be if you could get sound
This explains why the aliens never attempt to contact with us😂
Wonder weapon
The barometer that detected the equivalent of 173 decibels from Krakatau (Krakatoa is a typo that stuck) actually maxed out. The actual pressure was higher.
Kinda like the “it’s not 3.6 roentgens. It’s 15,000” scene from Chernobyl lol
173db. Not great, not terrible.
The dead silence of your parents disapproval is somehow deafening though
Preach it brother 😂🎉😅
Every time I talk about nerdy stuff
Sometimes my parents look at me like I've donned a tin foil hat. 😂
Too close to home lol
I'm still hearing my data disapproval.
All you bro 🫠
Yeah I was thinking Tunguska. Those shockwaves were picked up around the world. The 2013 Chelyabinsk shockwave also shattered windows, damaged over 7000 buildings and caused more than 1500 injuries from 18 miles up in the atmosphere. Meteorite (or comet) impacts (even air blasts) generate far more explosive energy than a volcano ever could. That kind of thing could happen again at any time.
The ultimate sword of Damocles
"Far more explosive energy than a volcano ever could" okay so this is technically true because space rocks don't have a size limit (other than the point they start glowing and become brown dwarfs, at which point they're a verifiable rock-star hybrid (haha, rockstar)), but that's not really what's being discussed. You are literally making this argument on a video about a volcano that made a sound wave the size of North America. You are making this claim, not about planet-killer asteroids but about events like Chelyabinsk, on a video about a volcanic event that makes Chelyabinsk look like a left-cheek-sneak (that's a term for a concealed fart in my family). I do understand the point, but... there's something to be said for contextual appropriateness, not just technical correctness. Using Chelyabinsk as your example did not make the point you thought lol and made you sound incorrect. If you'd have mentioned Chicxulub, that would have made more sense.
And yes, it could happen with less warning than most volcanic explosions, but 1) there are freak volcanic explosions that don't give significant warning, and 2) the bigger the asteroid, the better the chances are that we see it coming. If I'm not mistaken the Tunguska [asteroid? Meteorite? Comet? Eh... object] came from the direction of the Sun such that we couldn't see it for the glare. But that's a minimum of events.
Explosions don't *generate* energy, they *release* it. Also, your comparison makes no sense, and is largely irrelevant. Volcanos are limited by the size of whatever lump they are on, while meteorites can go higher by being larger *and* faster, but at some point you get apocalypse level events anyway, and both have happened. Although, there has to be a point at which a "meteorite" becomes something larger, such as a planet.
0:55 bro said "how loud can something get" in an almost perfect impersonation of smitty from jackbox games narration
😂😂😂 so true
Wrong
The volume of your toddler when they discover they can say some profanity whilst in the checkout line at Kroger. Loudest sound possible.
We found that the loudness of a toddler was proportional to the length of silence between to time it stubbed its toe to when it started screaming!🤭 Short time, oh, there there there. Long time...awaiting Krakatoa!🤣
@@RichardIresonMusician Yeah, that breath reload time is critical to loudness. If it's more than 2 seconds it is recommended to call for backup immediately.
As a Food4Less employee, and therefore a Kroger employee, this thread kills me 😂 supermarket workers dgaf, don't worry haha. But this does remind me of the time I, as a young child in the checkout line with my mom, watched her swipe her debit card, watched closely as she typed in 4 numbers into a little keypad, and then proceeded to read those 4 little personalized numbers *VERY LOUDLY TO THE WHOLE LINE* 😂
@@HT-Blindleader 🤣
After 10 seconds of holding breath, it becomes a Krakatoaddler
The intro of playstation 2 at 1 A.M is at whole another level
*dead silent violent whispers* "goddammit i forgot to turn it down first AGAIN" "f***** f***** f***" xD
The name Krakatoa sounds so painful. I always imagine stubbing my toe so hard that it cracks a nail.
I imagine squidward
Or a toe. Uh.
Crack-a-toe-a
@@youtubesuccs860like a proper Canadian eh
Crack-a-toe eh
@@MammothBehemothis the proper 'eh' pronounced like 'ah'?
the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation was so loud that it shaped the physical structure of the observable universe
That was a big bang...
@@CapaNoisyCapa But not THE Big Bang...
lol. everything was so densely packed the speed of sound was 1/3 the speed of light and it was all just a quark-gluon plasma
@@DavidPumpernickel well, dense packing in materials does cause their speed of sound to increase, to be fair. I'm sure that totally accounts for the difference and makes your fact unremarkable 😂 kidding, obviously
@@stevewithaq correct, Sqeve. Lol 😅
UA-cam's compression does NOT like that visual of particles vibrating
Neither did my brain.
UA-cam compression doesn't like anything, sometimes I consider youtube premium just to watch 1080p premium
Awesome shirt. It's louder than sound.
its from walmart, i have the same shirt.
@@Zatoichiswordman Noice.
Looks like a scrubs top - very comfortable
@@ZatoichiswordmanI have one too! 😂
That shirt was $150 OUT THE DOOR, and it wasn't even that complicated
Most people think a fire engine siren sound travels miles, but as a fire engine and ambulance operator, I can attest that the siren is nearly silent to 99% of anyone in my lane.
😂😂😂
As a driver, I just always assume it’s not in my lane.
@@ferretyluv evidently everyone thinks like you.
12:10 390 db: "When the person standing next to it turns from biology into physics" ;-)
xDDD
Closing a door at 3 AM, that is
*Now all of China knows you're here*
Also drawers and silverware, dishes in the cabinet, console startup sounds
@@cr0w342 Text messages when you didn't realize your phone wasn't on vibrate.
Opening a packet of crisps at a funeral-
Perfect.
A problem I often encounter when going for my 2 AM snack. Closing a fire door silently is pretty hard 😫
Is the fact that today is the anniversary of Chuck Yeager in a Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier for the first time a coincident? sounds like good timing
0:35 Id be that loud if I cracked a toe too
Grrr this makes me angry
I was in a very quiet place and had been so for a while. Silent the whole time ... I read the title, clicked it, realized my phone was on full volume and jumped thinking ...
"THIS!! THIS IS THE LOUDEST NOISE!!!!"
Well, once you know what the reference pressure is, you know the actual pressure. It is an absolute measurement. It's just that the pressure values are so small, and cumbersome, decibels are used as a mathematical convenience. In air the reference pressure is 20 micropascals, in water it's 1 micropascal, so one has to be careful comparing sound levels in air and water.
at 2:13 take off your glasses or squint to see the waves
good observation :)
Amen
the second loudest possible sound is flushing the toilet at 4 am
The guy living in the flat above me taking a piss like a racehorse at 5:30 am, like clockwork
The fun bits start at 7:04. Everything before is important background info.
Imagine a sound SOO loud that, it instantly vaporizes the people who hear it. The sound of death.
Last year I drew a comic strip about this and people yelled at me like "how do we KNOW it was the loudest sound possible" lol
"Cos analysis, plus if shock eave is not a sound any more"
There was a reddit thread (peacock feathers I think) that devolved into arguments about the definition of sound. Don't feel bad about trying, there's just a ton of unqualified "experts" roaming around.
I got teary-eyed watching a lot of this. This time didn't last long and ended abruptly. I miss this.
Great video man and you had a great idea in making this. Thanks for sharing
How loud was Chicxulub Impact ? Maybe Eons will answer that one.
Given other huge sounds, it would have gone around the planet dozen times. Probably deafened everything it didn't kill on that third of the planet. Shock wave then huge sound.
Then his was the loudest "sound" that ever happened on earth xd
Why not go with Theia impact?
@@willythemailboy2 Nobody around to hear it.
@@michaelpytel3280 There were no people around for Chicxulub either.
2:50 "Sponsored by: UwU"? 😂
Haha probably like “university washington” or something
I think its patreon
I noticed it too lmao
Loudest sounds.
1. Big Bang
2. Hypernova
3. Black hole ripping star apart.
4.The alarm at 5 AM.
Very true
i knew it! i knew this was gonna be the famous krakatoa incident lol
i heard that the sound waves from that were estimated to have traveled the earth more than twice, and ruptured the eardrums of nearby sailors who then went on to write about the coming end of the world in their journals afterward lol
Very interesting. I never knew until now about the 194 dB limit. Imagine what the shockwave was like when Theia hit the Earth and the moon was formed : I feel that that must have been the loudest bang ever to occur on earth. The noise would be the last of your worries though, given that the earth was still molten and the 'atmosphere' was mainly hydrogen 😅. Looking forward to your next video!
It doesn't have to be extremely loud to travel that distance.
It has to have these 3 characteristics:
1. The source of the sound (lets call it the membrane) has to be big... And what's bigger than a volcano.
2. The frequency (the wavelenght of the shock blast) must be low enough. And that is dictated by the membrane size and the speed of the blast.
3. The right atmospheric conditions, such as a temperature inversion layer, which would trap the sound wave and keep it between the atmosphere and the ocean surface. And temperature inversions happen all the time above the oceans. Especially at the time of the Krakatoa event.
There was a movie called Krakatoa: East Of Java, but Krakatoa is really west of Java.
Damn science!
After that explosion there probably was a bit of it east of Java!
The name Krakatoa in the film title was referring to the ship named, well, Krakatoa. Hollywood creativity at its finest…not. 😂😂😂
Imagine standing ON the world’s largest speaker !
And goes “BOOM”!
SEE YOU IN ORBIT !
Fun Fact, the water abatement systems utilized during most space rocket launches aren't solely for heat abatement... 🤔🤔🤔
What are they for?
@@gabbysmith7579The water absorbs some of the _absurd_ amounts of sound energy produced by rocket engines, preventing that energy damaging launchpad infrastructure, etc. - or at least _reducing_ the damage.
*Edit:* see Wikipedia's "Sound suppression system" article for more info :)
@@gabbysmith7579 Sound dampening
Speaking of sound, this guy has an amazing voice.
Me walking to the fridge at night and dropping a spoon and waking up the whole house feels like the loudest sound
Turning on your GameCube at midnight waking your parents
Also, the PS one from back in the day.
This went from "lemme attempt to explain to you just how loud this explosion was" to the universe going "pfft, Krakatoa? What a baby"
For all the talk about dB, I'm surprised you didn't go through the dBa vs dBc at least briefly. It would've seemed like an effective talk to get your point across about dBa vs dBc response graph, and how we use those measurements to determine sound intensity.
Your computer restarting after an automatic update in the middle of the night.
Astrophysicist here who specials in asteroids and planetary defense! This seems like such a small thing, but thank you SO MUCH for discussing Tunguska correctly. There is an *incorrect* overestimate of the number of trees that the shockwave flattened, propagated by almost 100 years of misinformation. Throughout so many sources, both in-print and online, the estimated number of fallen trees is incorrectly quoted as 80 million. This number is *now* estimated as a factor of 4 too high (Boslough, GSA Connects 2024). From a very niche corner of the research world: thank you for not quoting this false estimate of 80 million trees! SciShow continues to rock.
I found in a search of newspapers published at the time articles that mention of people hearing the sound of what they thought was canon fire. Fascinating stuff.
The Republic XF-84H "Thunderscreech" was a pretty loud supersonic propeller powered plane, it made something like 900 sonic booms a second and could be heard at least 30 miles away. It was so loud that one of the test pilots told the flight crew that none of them were big enough and there weren't enough of them to force him to go back into that plane.
The place you located Krakatoa was a bit out, but a great introduction to the science of sound and the concept of loudness.
11:10 I guess this was the Tunguska meteorite that exploded in Siberia.
I know it wasn't the loudest sound ever heard, however, it was the loudest sound I've ever heard... I was standing outside, just in front of my office, when a bomb exploded approximately 50 feet away. (Maybe 50-75 feet away) The shock wave physically pushed me backward against the building I was standing near. It felt like a giant hand had backhanded me, not quite sending me flying backward. The sound of the explosion made my ears ring for more than a month. The crater where the bomb landed was shocking small, no more than about 3 feet in diameter & about 2 feet deep. It irreparably damaged a couple dozen vehicles in the lot where it landed. I was second closest to the bomb, a couple of guys were in the lot inspecting vehicles & were only about 30-40 feet away from the impact. They survived by diving behind the dual wheels on a large trailer. That probably saved their lives. They heard the bomb coming in, only seconds before it hit. Another guy was about as close as I was & I've never seen anybody run so fast, before or since. We were used to being bombed almost daily. We developed a dark, graveyard sense of humor about it because 'they' usually couldn't hit the broad side of a huge barn. (So to speak)
If you were standing next to that bat, emitting deafening levels of ultrasound... even though you can't perceive the sound, would the pressure waves still damage your hearing?
I did a school project on Krakatoa once, ever since I've loved the history of it. Anak Krakatoa has a lot to live up to.
A microwave beeping at 3am
I can hear a dust mite roll off the door mat at 50 feet, but not my wife screaming about my Amazon orders on the same couch.
The physical limit of pressure waves in solids is the point at which the intermolecular bonds would break.
This is also known as when that glass cup hits the floor.
"when a sound doubles in loudness, it gets 10 times more intense" that is not how decibels work tho???
Yes, it is. They are logarithmic.
@@jenniferd9043 3dB is twice the energy, 10 dB is 10 times the energy. dB=10*Log(p2/p1).
@@richardl6751 fyi… loudness is generally measured as dB-SPL.
Sound Pressure Level (SPL) has units of pressure such as Pascals (Pa) and is measured at a point in space. dB-SPL = 20*log10(SPL/SPLref), where normally SPLRef = 20 microPascals (μPa).
Sound Power (Watts) is the total amount of energy radiated by an acoustical source, integrated over a closed surface such as a sphere. Sound power in dB follows 10*log10 (P2/P1).
A 1 Bell step is 10 times louder. 1 Bell = 10 decibels (dB). So yeah, that description was a bit fast and loose.
Right. A correct but (hopefully) clear statement could be "Ten decibels higher means ten times more intense, but twenty decibels higher means a hundred times more intense."
5:25 ".. when a sound doubles in loudness, it is 10 times more intense" That's exactly missing the point of logarithmic: That is just linear not logarihtmic. 2*x=10*y => x= 5 y. What you want to point out is exponential: One step louder means double intensity: 1,2,4,8,16, ... The inverse function of the exponential funktion is the logarithm. So if the intesity doubles, we hear it as just "one step louder".
You’ve not accurately represented what was said here - what was said was given in terms of a prior reference that both properties are a function of. Both of these things should be expressed as a function of increments to the same reference value. Every additional ten dB (one Bel) of SPL (sound pressure level) is a tenfold increase in intensity and is roughly perceived as twice as loud. An increase of 20 dB SPL is thus 100 times as intense as and 4 times louder than the reference value. The ratio has squared - the relationship is exponential, not linear, and is exactly as was described in the video. When sound is perceived to double in loudness, it has intensified by a factor of ten. Loudness is actually much more complicated than that, but that’s a good general rule of thumb.
@@wholehandedly Sorry but I insist on 2*x=10*y is a linear relation, not an exponentional one. That was said in the video -- and that is wrong when it comes to percieved lodness.
You also miss the fact that a linear step of an arbitrary "one" in one scale means a doubling in the other one -- which is the key to an exonential behaviour. That's why we use dB (decibel) "Bel" means we use the decadic logarithm of the relation to a reference value. "deci" just means the tenth of a unit. Please don't make it more complicated than it is: Human senses (also brightness or the perception of numbers) are mostly logarithmic. Things like frequency filters like the A scale in dB(A) are a different story like the different sensitivity of the eye to different wavelength.
@@f.herumusu8341 I didn’t say your equation wasn’t linear. I said it didn’t accurately describe the stated relationship. “When a sound is perceived as twice as loud, it is actually ten times as intense” explicitly implies that when a sound is 2^n times as loud as a given reference sound, it is 10^n times as intense as said reference.
Extremely fascinating topic.
A vomiting cat at 2 AM.
What a perfect, Vsauce style question!
Man, you're a funny host. You have a great vibe. I like you. Keep it up, you seem to be a great, nice person!
This man is an legend with his voice
What an awesome edutainment piece!
0:09 Diogo Rodrigues Island? I'd heard of it, it's even in the news lately.
yep
Since they mentioned soundwaves under water! Sonar uses this principle to detect objects that reflect the soundwave that the vessel sent out. To get higher accuracies, sonars can pump more energy into these soundwaves to get more of a reflection back.
Military vessels have sonars so powerful that diving next to one when it goes off would kill someone or at the very least heavily injure them.
Loudest sound erupts about 45 minutes after I eat Taco Bell
The most powerful sound ever recorded is me opening the fridge at 2 AM.
TY SciShow!
Dude, you have a great voice.
the Tzar Bomba, a 50 megaton nuke tested by the russians
That was smaller than Krackatoa
(And if you *can't* 'get organised' no matter how many classes or paper organisers you try, then please get tested for ADHD.
'Laziness' is often thrown around at people with learning disabilities. Sometimes other people do actually just find life easier than you do. You're still a person worth just as much as them.
Medications can help, but not everyone chooses to take them, they're recommended to be taken with talking therapies anyway, and even just the diagnosis can help. Plus the testing is interesting for introspection regardless of result.)
I would say it's whatever vibration is slightly less powerful than the intensity required to instantly render one deaf instantly.
Question!! Born-deaf people that gain some hearing later in life often say that they thought the sun would make noise.
So...does the sun make noise on a register we can't detect?
The sound is a constantly occuring nuclear explosion millions of times stronger than the nukes we have on earth
Yes, it's loud
We don't hear it because there's no air in space the sound can travel through
No because the vacuum of space but yes, you can find videos of actual recordings of the sun’s atmosphere
@jaegerolfa oh, I knew that. 'In space, no one can hear you scream.'
There is actual audio of the sun??
@@Obskewrial probably a conversion of light to sound, but I'm sure someone had done that. I don't think we've sent a probe into the sun with a microphone, but I could be wrong.
@@Obskewrial pretty sure it’s just modified for our ears but yeah you can find videos of the sounds of different planets and stars.
Video starts at 7:04
Forgetting to stop the microwave at 1 second when grabbing a 2am snack
As this an educational video I would like to add something: dB is just a number, a ratio. As mentioned in the video, for it to "mean" something on its own we need a reference point. As soon as we do that we should make clear what reference point is used in order to avoid confusion. There are lots of common suffixes for this (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decibel#List_of_suffixes). I guess what is described here (after the introduction to dB where simply the ratio is meant) is most likely dB(A) or dBA (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-weighting).
This confused me a lot, and still does, when I come in contact with dB values. Especially in acoustics it's often very unclear what is meant exactly as oftentimes only "dB" is used even though a ratio to a known fixed point is meant (like dBA).
Fun fact: our hearing is *not* the most sensitive at 1 kHz. It's just a nice round number. The actual sensitivity peak is around 3 kHz. TBF, it's not off by a ton, only like 3 dB.
The sentence "I'm not mad I'm dissapointed" is the loudest noise you can ever hear from your parents.
The magma chamber breaking/collapsing is what caused the boom. The Earth, cracking very loudly, and shearing off a chunk of itself.
There is a short story film documentary about a Dutch family that survived Krakatoa on Sumatra. They lost their baby, but the rest just survived.
Bodies washed up on the African coast a year later, from Krakatoa.
Highly recommend Simon Winchester book Krakatoa, with science and world news highlighted. Krakatoa explosion announced the start of news spreading fast via telegraph to vast parts of the planet. Modern media arrived with a bang. Thanks to SciShow for a great discussion of big sound.
1883 Krakatoa still gets all this wonderment for being heard 3,000 miles away on Rodriguez Island... Like are we just going to pretend Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai wasn't heard and recorded 6,000 miles away all over Alaska in 2022?!?!
Hunga tonga didn't make the people deaf tho.
Cold air vs warm affects the distance sound can travel considerably
@@BirnieMac1 also hunga tonga located in the middle of the ocean, barely any land mass, so the sound can travel freely without obstructions.
This. Not a single mention of HHTH being heard over ten thousand kilometers away in _Yukon, Canada_ ?
Like, whether or not it was louder than Krakatoa _close up,_ it's definitely the furthest away sound to ever be heard by a human (that we have records of).
The pressure wave of the sound of the Krakatoa explosion traveled three and a half times around the entire globe.
Calling a volcanic island Krakatoa is a bit of foreshadowing
Have this guy do more he rocks
Opening the fridge at 3am when your parents are asleep
10:38 - 11:09Wow, a shockwave so powerful it wrapped around the planet multiple times! The Krakatoa explosion truly redefined what we think of as 'loud'. This makes me wonder what other unimaginable forces are out there in the universe!
Excellent presentation
Dropping a plastic cup on ceramic kitchen floor at 3am while everyone else is sleeping - THAT'S the loudest possible consecutive sound
I'm listening to this while doing laundry 😅
I love these more detailed videos 🤓
The loudest sound in the world is actually my child’s musical keyboard.
I think there's an aspect missing in the analysis--the size of the shock wave. Something close to a point source will produce sound that falls roughly with the square of the distance but as the size of the source increases, it will get closer and closer to linear with distance. I'm not smart enough to figure out all the details but I imagine it would have something to do with how large the shock wave was, in other words, how far the exploding gasses managed to keep pushing the air at supersonic velocities.
Greetings from Venezuela, South America. 🇻🇪👋
The loudest possible sound has to be the creaking my knees make when I get out of bed
This guy makes his own Kambucha
The loudest sound possible is a shampoo bottle falling on the floor of the bathtub.
Loudest possible sound? That plastic container protecting the cake at 1AM. :) Thanks for the video!
Imagine the enormous power needed to create that sound.
For sound waves, intensity (energy per unit area) increases with amplitude. However, a large object can produce more total energy simply due to its size, even with low-amplitude waves. In this case, the sound spreads over a larger area, resulting in high overall energy but relatively low intensity and decibel level at any given point.
I think Disaster Area, would be in for a shout for this.
But will they hear the shout from orbit?
Still not louder than the neighbor's vacuum cleaner during morning hours
Hou need to take frequency into account when talking about distance.
As lower frequency at lower decibels can be heard from further away, while higher frequencies dont travel as far.
In first hearing (without seeing) this video, I thought Penn Jillette was doing voice over work for SciShow. Then, I thought this guy sounds like Penn Jillette. Finally, I landed on my current theory: Penn Jillette is doing voice-over in this video, and this guy (who looks like he could have Penn's voice) is lip syncing.
I recall when the Honga Tonga volcano blew up nearly 3 years ago, it was heard as far away as Alaska. Don't know how it compares to Krakatoa though.