Noise

=========================================================================

Our teacher of Sound defined Noise as disagreeable sound as opposed to agreeable Music.

That surely is a prime example of relativity...all modern music is unbearable to me and so is noise.

There was a news item the other day that surgeons perform better when classical music is on in the Operation Theater...thankfully the patient is under anesthesia {;-}

All I can say is that noise is natural and music artificial...in Nature...compare natural light and laser light. I haven't yet heard of naturally produced laser light in the Universe.

Electronics always fascinated me. This is because we had a very good Electronics Lab and a wonderful Teacher at our AU.

And when we switched on our Hartley Oscillator circuit after some Power Prayers, and with the twiddle of a pot the lovely monochromatic oscillations jump up on the oscilloscope screen and stay as steady as a rock, my wonder knew no bounds.

For we had applied a DC voltage of 400 volts and we got an AC voltage of 5 volts rms on the screen. And our Teacher beautifully explained it is all due to the inherent 'tube noise' in the circuit out of which the resonant element picks up the oscillations...no music without noise!!!

And I never had an aptitude for Math and bore it a grudge, as happens with anything you are forced to do for your living.

But Fourier Theorem was bewitching from the word 'go'.

For its physical applications.

And my Guru SDM told me that the great mathematicians of the day never believed the claim of Fourier that a totally discontinuous thing like a square wave can be built up by the addition of totally continuous functions like sines and cosines...of course the trick is that it requires an infinity of them.

And whenever I used to switch on my laser pointer and direct it on the screen of the Jumbo Class, I used to wonder how a DC battery cell can produce such a monochromatic affair like a laser beam. It just picks up that particular frequency and amplifies it dumping all the others.

And there is that 'noise' that gave Nobels for a couple of Radio Engineers for their achievement that eluded eminent Cosmologists like Dicke!!!

I watched with wonder that the proverbial maternal instinct is really true...for, my D-i-L Sailaja used to switch off the light in their bedroom where her months-old daughter Ishani used to sleep and close the door almost shut and watch a 'noisy' program on TV. But as soon as Ishani makes a wee squeak that eluded all of us, her mom would get up and run in...

Most of the time, not only in dreams but also in waking, our brain keeps making 'noise'. And only when need arises, it picks up 'signals' out of the noise.

Supratim calls these 'noisy signals' Power Blogs {;-}

=========================================================================