David Darling
speaker
349 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 1 Aug
David Darling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You could hear it 25 miles away when it was just running on the ground with its propellers turning.
And the reason for that is that propellers turned at supersonic speeds, and they produced a sound of about 200 decibels, which is pretty close to what you would get from a rocket taking off.
It was tremendously loud, and it caused all kinds of problems.
The ground engineers were all suffering from nausea and this type of thing.
But there are natural sounds which are even greater than that.
And one of them, for example, would be the explosion of Krakatoa, the island of Krakatoa in 1883, which is reckoned to have made a sound of 310 decibels and could be heard 3,000 miles away.
Now, I say 310 decibels.
there's a physical limit to loudness actually a sound of 194 decibels beyond that is not really sound as we know it as a series of supersonic pulses so there's that really at that point it stops being loudness it turns into something else and quietest what i would i would think silence is silence so the quietest places
are really places that are made specifically to be quiet which are called anechoic chambers and these basically absorb all the sound that you can produce immediately so you get no sound coming back to you whatsoever and these places are actually very difficult to tolerate because we're so used to having even you know slight sounds in the background it's it's it's not a natural situation to be in and so
People can't tolerate this for very long because you start to hear your own heartbeat, breathing, and even sounds made that you never normally hear, but your own muscles creaking and things like this.
And it becomes very, very disconcerting.
And so they do have some of these anechoic chambers open to the public, but they limit how long people can spend in them because you start to hallucinate after a while and go crazy because it's a very, very...
a very, very unsettling experience.
Well, where are these things and who made them and why?
Well, they make them for carrying out all sorts of experiments, for example, on hi-fi equipment.
There's all sorts of situations where you don't want any sound coming back at you.
There is one at Bell Labs, for example.
They're usually at major laboratories, quite a few in the US.
There's some in Europe as well.
And they're just used for carrying out scientific experiments.
Showing 101–120 of 349 · page 6 of 18
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