Media alt text:
3D render of old tv set with animated static on its screen, as if tuned to a dead channel.
This is a very non scientific answer, but when I was a kid (good 40 years ago) I remember having a science book that called TV static “an echo of the big bang”. I guess that would mean just randomly scattered energy bouncing around on all bands?..
I could probably Google it and give you an answer, but I’ll just wait for someone with a more convincingly and authoritatively written reply.
Well apparently now astrophysicists are saying maybe the Big Bang didn’t happen. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Since the last Lemmy update, if i delete a comment, it stays there sayin’ “deleted by creator”, just like yours.
Anyway, i wanted to see if I could still reply to a deleted message and I could, as i am writing this reply rn.
Very confusing for me is that, at least on my client on Android, your deleted message is displayed full and clear above the reply box.
Is this the intended behavior of deleted messages on Lemmy, it just hides the message, but it’s still available for anyone to read if they hit reply?
Uh Oh
but I’ll just wait for someone with a more convincingly and authoritatively written reply.
Pfft sprayed my drink lol
Not all of it. But parts of it really are due to the cosmic microwave background radiation. Light from the moment the universe was transparent enough to let light spread. It’s from about 300,000 years after the big bang if I recall correctly. It’s the earliest image of the universe we have. And it’s more or less everywhere.
and what happens if you broadcast static, like point it at a car thats blasting some shitty radio station, and you are transmitting that same frequency? the distortion will destroy their speakers.
The cosmic microwave background?
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” W. Gibson.
It’s wild that this makes no, or little at most, sense to entire generations now.
In another bit of poorly-aged prediction by Gibson, Case, the main character, brings some RAM with him to sell for a quick buck on the street. How much RAM? Three entire megabytes.
Here’s the real question: did Gibson write Neuromancer before or after Bill Gates said no one would ever conceivably need more than 640k of RAM?
Ha I remember that. I also recall someone in the 80s there was a pop song popular in Poland, entitled “Glass Weather”. It was about these rainy autumn evenings when there’s nothing better to do than sit in front of your (black and white) TV. The lyrics were mentioning “apartment window blue from the TV glow”.
Waves are everywhere. The TV picks up whatever waves it can. Some of those waves are signals meant to transmit an image (eg from a broadcast tower), others are just random noise in our environment.
Not an expert, but that was my understanding
“Waves are everywhere” made me think of the Feynman’s “Seeing Things” video. “Tremendous mess of waves”
It’s been awhile since I’ve messed about with this, so I don’t remember (and you may not either, so this is an open question), but wouldn’t it produce the effect even if disconnected from an antenna?
If so…Would the same principle be in play of it picking up on general EM waves to cause the effect?
Afaik the antenna is picking up the background waves/radiation and the TV is displaying that background waves/radiation. If you disconnect the antenna, the TV will have no signal to display, it’ll be as blank as it can get.
Yeah, the same way a radio tuned to a station could be static until you plug in an antenna.
You could also get hums and interference from other sufficiently strong EMF sources, like how AM radios can pick up the sound of transmission lines
