Sound technology has been improving at a fast rate over the last few years. Two engineering students at George Mason University have developed a fire extinguisher that transmits a donut of low-frequency sound waves that, when aimed at a fire, can immediately snuff it. They had hypothesized that high-frequency waves would be useful for extinguishing fire, but actually found that it was low-frequency, bass tones of sound that worked in this way.
Researchers at Duke University have developed a plastic device that can “cloak” sound, by diverting the waves away from anything on which the device is mounted. It's a pyramid of layers of perforated plastic that alter the trajectory of sound waves as they hit the device. Instead of reflecting those waves out, it allows the waves to continue on the same linear path as if they'd never struck the object.
But a NASA sound wave device is the most intriguing. It uses sound waves to levitate objects. The waves are generated by two devices facing one another, and the interaction of a series of colliding waves causes acoustic and gravitational forces to cancel each other out. Object can then “float” in these colliding waves. One potential use for the device is mixing liquids together in a containerless environment, thus preventing contamination. Another would be in transporting delicate and fragile objects, including biological cells. The technology uses high-frequency sound waves out of the range of human hearing.
But is all this sonic technology really new? Researcher Dr. Carmen Boulter, a professor at the Universisty of Calgary, wonders if the stone building blocks of the great pyramids in Egypt might have been cut with sound waves thousands of years ago. She suggests the ancients might have possessed crystal oscillator technology, utilizing quartz crystals that vibrate at certain frequencies, on a much larger scale than we use them today, in order to achieve their precision cuts.
Boulter claims sound technology was also used in ancient healing “hospitals” in the area of Dahshur. A local there describes the House of the Spirit possessing a system of acoustic chambers that allowed doctors of the time to diagnose and heal with sound. Boulter further suggests that the pyramids had harmonic structures, fields of harmonic resonance, that were designed to replicate the harmonic cavities of the human body. Such sound healing techniques would restore the correct harmonic within the body of a person who was ill.
The big question is, could sound technology help to explain how the pyramids were actually built? Did the ancients possess a knowledge and technology involving sound waves that could levitate the enormous stones used to build the pyramids? Please give me your thoughts in the comments.
