Doppler Effect Quotes

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.

We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in – a way to signal those lies that could be more accurately described as dreams. Lies – they make for a tidy little psychological Doppler effect, tell us more about a liar than an undistorted self-report ever could.

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The Centrifugal Force of Arguments”: The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The

There have been applied sciences throughout the ages. ... However this so-called practice was not much more than paper in nearly all of these cases, and the various applied sciences were only lacking a bagatelle, namely proper scientific practice. The applied sciences show the application of theoretic doctrines in existing events; but that is precisely what it does, it merely shows. Whereas the scientific practice autonomously puts to use these theories.

Everyone who said it was coming didn't have the privilege of being born blindfolded, but their words were always quieter than sight, anyways. Is there a greater horror than always being proven right? If tomorrow always shows up yesterday for those that cannot see, are prophets then vehicles of the future? Or do they just see now as it is? The Doppler Effect of Ignorance destroys sequentiality. But we always show up today, whether we were a day late or not, to revel in the horrors that await us. Only the rationalists can watch the world burn with a smile on their face, a smile that no one else can see.

Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast. One way to understand this is to imagine a grid of dots that are each spaced an inch apart on the elastic surface of a balloon. Then assume that the balloon is inflated so that the surface expands to twice its original dimensions. The dots are now two inches away from each other. So during the expansion, a dot that was originally one inch away moved another one inch away. And during that same time period, a dot that was originally two inches away moved another two inches away, one that was three inches away moved another three inches away, and one that was ten inches away moved another ten inches away. The farther away each dot was originally, the faster it receded from our dot. And that would be true from the vantage point of each and every dot on the balloon. All of which is a simple way to say that the galaxies are not merely flying away from us, but instead, the entire metric of space, or the fabric of the cosmos, is expanding. To envision this in 3-D, imagine that the dots are raisins in a cake that is baking and expanding in all directions. On

had said, in effect: “Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it’s the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn’t the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there’s blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.” You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are live things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there’s a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I’d scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn’t look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.

For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women—teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking, Not yet. But soon. Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys.

All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: "Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a trainwhistle suddenly drops it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only the air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.

Then came a series of wondrous discoveries, beginning in 1924, by Edwin Hubble, a colorful and engaging astronomer working with the 100-inch reflector telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, California. The first was that the blur known as the Andromeda nebula was actually another galaxy, about the size of our own, close to a million light years away (we now know it’s more than twice that far). Soon he was able to find at least two dozen even more distant galaxies (we now believe that there are more than 100 billion of them). Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast.

In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).

Among much else, Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggested that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. But Einstein was not a cosmologist, and he accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was fixed and eternal. More or less reflexively, he dropped into his equations something called the cosmological constant, which arbitrarily counterbalanced the effects of gravity, serving as a kind of mathematical pause button. Books on the history of science always forgive Einstein this lapse, but it was actually a fairly appalling piece of science and he knew it. He called it “the biggest blunder of my life.” Coincidentally, at about the time that Einstein was affixing a cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an astronomer with the cheerily intergalactic name of Vesto Slipher (who was in fact from Indiana) was taking spectrographic readings of distant stars and discovering that they appeared to be moving away from us. The universe wasn’t static. The stars Slipher looked at showed unmistakable signs of a Doppler shift‖—the same mechanism behind that distinctive stretched-out yee-yummm sound cars make as they flash past on a racetrack. The phenomenon also applies to light, and in the case of receding galaxies it is known as a red shift (because

It is not only the theory of inflation that tells us we don't know all of the masses in the universe. In addition, there are observed facts that tell us the same. One of these is the chaotic motion of galaxies inside galaxy clusters. Galaxies don't appear singly, but rather inside such larger groupings. They are kept from escaping by the gravitational pull of the mass of the cluster. Individual galaxies move inside a cluster with velocities that are measurable by means of the Doppler effect. That's how we know these velocities to be so large that the gravity of the visible mass of the cluster does not suffices to hold the galaxies it contains together: Were there only the cluster's visible mass, its galaxies would have had to fly apart long ago. To keep all of them within the cluster, there must be about one hundred times more mass present than what is noticeable to us as visible matter.

The interpretation relies on a simple but striking effect, first described by Christian Doppler in 1842. Doppler pointed out that if a source of waves is moving away from us, then successive peaks in the wave pattern it emits will come from farther away, so that the waves will arrive stretched out.

The Doppler Defense I went to court in Manhattan and pleaded 'not guilty' to 'running a red light'. I used the 'Doppler Effect defense', saying I approached the red light at such speed that the frequency of the red light wave from the traffic lamp shifted to a green light wave relative to me, the observer. The judge agreed with my scientific explanation and dropped the red light charge. He then and upgraded the charge to a speeding ticket and sentenced me to '30 days of community service in another dimension'. Man, do I fucking hate Brooklyn.

The DopplerEffect occurs when either the source of a wave or the observer of a wave (or both) are moving. When a source of a wave is moving towards you, the apparent frequency of the wave you detect is higher than that emitted. For instance, if a car approaches you while playing a note at 500 Hz, the sound you hear will be slightly higher. The opposite occurs (the frequency observed is lower than emitted) for a receding wave or if the observer moves away from the source. It’s important to note that the speed of the wave does not change –it’s traveling through the same medium so the speed is the same. Due to the relative motion between the source and the observer the frequency changes, but not the speed of the wave. Note that while the effect is similar for light and electromagnetic waves the formulas are not exactly the same as for sound.

Just as with sound waves, light waves emitted by a moving source show the Doppler effect. What we observe instead of the sound pitch is the color of the light: Red light has a lower frequency than blue light. If the light source is moving toward the observer, the light appears bluer; as it moves away, it will appear red. Likewise, an observer moving inside the blackbody volume will register the radiation coming from the direction opposite to his motion as being blue, that which comes from behind as red. The difference between the two frequencies can tell him his velocity of motion with respect to the blackbody radiation. This difference, however, will decrease as the temperature is lowered; it will vanish altogether at absolute zero. Regardless of an observer's velocity of motion, the radiation meeting him at zero temperature is the same from every direction. The observer therefore has no way of finding out from the radiation alone in which direction he is moving, or whether he is moving at all. Once we accept this scenario, we have already fixed the spectrum (that is, the amount of radiation as a function of its frequency) within some constant factor. However, the result obtained in this way does not appear to make sense: It implies that a blackbody at zero temperature has an infinite supply of energy in the form of zero temperature radiation. The same astonishing result can be derived by means of the quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation, which we call quantum electrodynamics. This theory, the implications of which have been verified in many instances with remarkable precision, tells us that the true vacuum at zero temperature still has an infinite supply of radiation energy. As we proceed, we will see that electromagnetic radiation is in fact only one component, albeit infinite in quantity, of the unfathomable energy supply of the vacuum.

Experiments with the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite, which was launched in 1989, showed in 1990 with overwhelming precision what was already known from previous experiments-that the cosmic background radiation filling the universe has all the properties of blackbody radiation at absolute temperature 2.735 degrees, save some tiny deviations. It would be very surprising if Earth were at rest with respect to this radiation. The velocity of Earth relative to it was first measured in 1977 from an airplane by investigating the influence of the Doppler effect (fig. 57). The blackbody radiation as received by an observer who moves relative to it displays what is called a "dipolar asymmetry": The radiation coming from the direction in which the observer moves is shifted to higher frequencies, the radiation from the opposite direction to lower frequencies. This shift has the remarkable property that the radiation arriving from any direction has all the properties of a blackbody radiation; only the temperature is shifted-to higher values in front, to lower in the rear. By measuring this temperature difference of about .0035 Celsius, scientists have established that the solar system is moving toward the constellation Leo with a velocity of of approximately 250 miles per second relative to the background radiation. By properly adding velocities, it follows that the Milky Way itself moves at a speed of about 500 miles per second relative to the background radiation.

Doppler effect.