You know that sound when god smites some poor bastard who pissed him off? Like that.
My ears are still ringing!
To state the obvious, an explosion large enough doesn’t really register as “sound”, but is more like being hit by a wall of air. For comparison, imagine being close to a space shuttle launch: so loud you’re pretty much deaf. Or a nuclear explosion, where instead of “hearing” the explosion you’ll be instantly vaporised.
Based on a quick google for guesses as to “the amount of energy in the big bang” which is a pretty fuzzy concept, it would be equivalent to 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 atomic bombs and is so hot that gravity and magnetism are invalidated, let alone sound. That may be way too low, but hopefully gives some idea of the magnitude.
Nah, Barenaked Ladies did a song about it but never specified how loud it was.
You’ve been limed by the Limist.
I thought it was the white-grapist.
The chablist. Easier to say than gewurtztraminerst.
So tinnitus is really hearing the Big Bang? COOL!
There was an Earth-shattering kaboom.
So the question is, if the Big Bang made a sound, how loud would that sound be? Like, if cows were fish, what kind of fish would they be?
That’s easy. Cows are Sarcopterygii, as are most readers of this board.
So what you’re saying is, the Big Bang occured because God nuked a burrito so hot he couldn’t eat it and He asploded?
Well, they have heard the sound a Black Hole makes (deepest sound ever recorded):
Is it possible to view the inhomogeneities of the CBR as primordial pressure waves (aka sound) “frozen” by cosmic inflation?
It occurs to me that, for all the talk we’ve done, nobody’s actually given an answer to the OP. Loudness is generally given in terms of a pressure difference. If I use the pressure difference before and after inflation, assume that inflation was roughly 60 e-foldings, assume that pressure after inflation was approximately zero and that pressure before inflation was approximately equal to the total energy density, and assume that energy density was at the critical density, then I get that the change in pressure from before inflation to after corresponds to about 1500 decibels. A few caveats, here: First, that figure is only good to within about an order of magnitude, since we don’t really know how much the scaling factor changed during inflation, and some of my assumptions were sloppy anyway. Second, that’s a lot more than it looks like, since decibels are already a logarithmic scale (which also means that the decibel value being within an order of magnitude is extremely vague). So that’s much, much more than 10 times as loud as 150 decibels (10 times as loud as 150 decibels would in fact be a mere 160 decibels).
EDIT:
Yes, that’s exactly what they are.
Ah, a 13 Billion BCE Style Deaf Ray
:d&r:
The Big Bang was a one-off prototype, and is no longer available. Current models only go to me.
Feh. I’ll see your Spinal Tap and raise you Disaster Area.
Wouldn’t it be like the tree falling in the woods that doesn’t make a sound if it falls on Helen Keller?