The question was originally a joke and used to give Cha Cha, a question answering base by via texting, to confuse them. My curious mind has left me bored and I stumbled upon this website, being a fan of The Straight Dope, I figured to ask. How loud was the Big Bang?
About as loud as that weird green text. Does that help? You know, since there is no sound in a vacuum.
I think a bigger question is whether the big bang had any space for the sound to propogate to, anyways. Remember, space itself is being created here.
I don’t know how loud it was, but there is a simulation of what it “sounded” like shortly after the Big Bang (in cosmic terms, 100,000 years is “shortly”).
I read somewhere that you can still hear it.
It wasn’t as loud as the Big Bang that preceded it, but it was louder than the next Big Bang will be.
Actually space wasn’t a vacuum then; not for a long time.*
As BigT says, space was coming into being at that point, so at the very start there wasn’t anything as such to have a “sound”; and immediately after space wasn’t filled with normal matter. Answering the question would require a definition of “sound” in this context that you are willing to accept. And it would require a knowledge of just what kind of turbulence existed during the early universe that I don’t think anyone has yet.
*And in fact it’s arguable if there’s no sound in a vacuum; space is full of charged gases that react to the passage of objects with shockwaves. The mechanism isn’t the same as in atmosphere and an ear could never “hear” it, but it does act rather like ordinary sound does. The right instrumentation would be perfectly capable of “hearing” the “sound” of a satellite or the Moon moving through space.
I suspect you are thinking of the microwave background radiation, that is sometimes referred to pseudo-poetically as an “echo of the Big Bang.” It is electromagnetic radiation, however, not sound.
A better way to put that would be to say that space is not really a perfect vacuum. In a true vacuum there would be no sound at all.
What’s the sound of the universe now? The Big Bang hasn’t ended - we’re still in the middle of it.
Loud enough at low frequencies that galactic clusters formed at the high points of the pressure waves.
Ducks of Oregon Discuss Cosmic Background Radiation:
Similar things have been known to happen at Grateful Dead concerts, but the mechanism there does not strictly rely on the intensity of the sound waves.
If we are lucky we will never hear a sound loud enough to precipitate galactic cluster formation.
I guess you could argue that sound is a change is pressure. Thus we could use the change in pressure of the early time of the big bang to derive a SPL. However if we consider that the universe started from a singularity we have an infinite/undefined pressure at the absolute start, and thus infinite or undefined loudness. After that the pressure just keeps dropping and dropping.
The inflationary period should make for a pretty big pressure drop too. You could argue that that that was pretty loud.
I would hazard a guess the early universe had a sonic squelcher that limited noise beyond 55 decibels. Otherwise it would be possible to hear you scream.
It sounded as if a hundred thousand people had said “whop.”
Given that the speed of sound is miniscule compared the c plus expansion during the big bang…
I’ve got nothing.
If a universe explodes into existence and there’s no-one there to hear, does it make a big bang?
Hypothetically speaking, if it were audible some way, how loud would it be?
Not minuscule. In a radiation-dominated gas like we had shortly after the Bang, the speed of sound is 1/3 the speed of light.
I wonder if the “tone deaf” heard it?
The big bang was almost as loud as a Spinal Tap concert.
It went to 12.