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Light and sound are physical phenomena that can be measured, reproduced, and ultimately amplified. The microscope is an example of very direct amplification, wh
by deckar01 11y ago
Light and sound are physical phenomena that can be measured, reproduced, and ultimately amplified. The microscope is an example of very direct amplification, which has no parallel for amplifying microscopic sounds that I am aware of.
- markbnj 11y agoWell if the microscope is an amplifier of light then of course the amplitude of sound can also be increased, and sounds that were too faint to be audible may become audible. There's your parallel. I can't say whether the analogy is actually well-founded, because I don't know whether it makes sense to speak of magnification as amplification. It strikes me as off, though. A large mirror can amplify light by collecting more of it, without magnifying the resulting image, can't it?
- deckar01 11y agoI think one of the issues with the microscope analogy is that microscopes provide their own light source and the object obstructs the light to produce a signal. The objects themselves don't emit light, where as the DNA is assumed to already be emitting sound (vibration) that needs to be amplified.
- tesseract 11y agoIf I had to picture a "light amplifier" I would think of a laser or something like a photomultiplier/image intensifier tube, not so much a microscope. Not sure what a "sound magnifier" might actually be. There exist apparatuses called "acoustic lenses" but I don't believe they are used for applications that might be considered analogous to a microscope. Perhaps something like a stethoscope, or just a horn (think of the horn on early gramophones) might be considered as allowing humans to hear sounds that would otherwise be too faint to hear.