From Osher Doctorow
There are two fascinating areas of research comparing sound and light
which physicists should not ignore:
1) Astrophysics, especially black hole Astrophysics
2) Psychology
There are quite a few indications that sound plays an important role
in for example binary star systems related to black holes, and readers
can look up those in arXiv or in some of my past threads. The
Koreans cited also give considerable discussion on related topics.
Here I want to mention a few words about psychology. A curious
things happens in some old people (arguably more than meets the eye so
to speak), namely a "split" between vision and sound or audition.
For example, old drivers often can't concentrate on driving visually
when they talk. Of course, young people often can't either, but it
arguably gets worse with age.
Another thing that at least sometimes happens with age is that the
split between vision and sound lasts longer. That is, old people
sometimes entirely focus on vision when driving and entirely ignore
sound, which is usually great other than when ambulances or fire
engines or police cars are racing past; or vice, versa, they sometimes
do the opposite.
More interesting perhaps in some ways is when old people entirely
forget "self conversations" or "rehearsal" or "reminding oneself" in a
mental version of sound. Older people generally get tired more than
younger ones, and there is a tendency to also get tired of repeating
old habits "endlessly" including self-conversations, rehearsals,
"reminding oneself". The dangers here including eating too much
because the old "self conversations" of why it's disadvantageous to do
so have been ignored or forgotten, drinking too much, failing to
exercise, and so on.
The deeper idea behind my examples is that sound and vision are really
very close coordinated in young human beings, at least during healthy
periods, and that leads me to ask whether light speed and sound speed
could be similar in various ways in the Universe at a Fundamental
level. If you read the Korean paper that I cited, and references
therein, you might well start to think that this is the case. If
it's true, then the well known Mach or Mach Speed or Mach Number which
is dimensionless and which constitutes merely a boundary between
subsonic, sonic, and supersonic regimes, hints at a similar division
for light. But of course, some people don't see anything if it's not
in front of their noses so to speak.
Osher Doctorow
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