Science Makes BYU's Birthday Blast Extra Special

A professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) decided to make the school's 150th birthday extra memorable. Instead of a regular party, he used science to blow out candles on a giant birthday cake. This wasn't just any science, though. It was a special technique called time reversal acoustics. This method focuses sound waves to create extremely loud noises. The professor, Brian Anderson, has been studying this technique for years. He and his students use special rooms where sound bounces around in a unique way. These rooms help them create sounds so loud they can simulate explosions. For BYU's birthday, Anderson teamed up with a recent graduate, Jay Cliftmann. Together, they figured out how to blow out candles using focused, loud sound.Here's how it worked: they recorded sound traveling from a speaker to a microphone. Then, they played the recording backward. This made the sound waves go back to the exact spot where the microphone was. It sounds crazy, but in a room where sound bounces around, it actually works. They aimed 180 decibels of sound at each candle. That's way louder than a rock concert, which is usually around 120 decibels. Anderson explained that in their lab, they've created sounds over 200 decibels. To put that into perspective, a lawnmower is about 85 decibels. Their focused sound was 562, 000 times louder than a lawnmower. This technique isn't just for birthday parties. It can help locate earthquakes, find gunshots in cities, and even break up kidney stones without surgery. So, why go through all this trouble for a birthday cake? Anderson said it was a fun way to show how much students and professors love BYU. He also saw it as a metaphor. Just like the focused sound, Christ can focus on and help each person, even in a chaotic world.