God forgot earlids

We don’t have earlids.

Imagine walking out of a movie theater on a bright summer day. There’s just too much light to handle, because your eyes are used to the dark. So you close your eyelids.
But when there’s too much noise, you can’t close your earlids. It’s kind of a bummer, actually.

God must have forgotten them. At least He gave us Bose headphones.
I wish I had some earlids, because my life is noisy.

There’s that piercing alarm clock two doors down, and the guy who keeps hitting the snooze button. There’s the dorm room/home theater now showing Ironman in all of its surround-sound glory. There’s the hammering and drilling of construction on the new Ashton.

Sometimes I feel like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas: “That’s one thing I hate! All the noise, noise, noise!”

But there’s more than just the literal noise. We are always in a flood of useless information.

The Internet certainly provides more than its fair share of noise. Just look at YouTube comments such as “ROFL, stupid emo’s r dumb!!!” and those “Which citrus fruit are you?” quizzes on Facebook.

MTV and VH1 guarantee that at least two pointless shows are on TV at any given time.

In all this noise, our brains try to filter the sound out and help us attend to the important pieces of the vast input we receive. 

Signal is whatever you’re listening for. Signal is the melody, the story, the logic.
Noise is the static fuzz, the experimental error, the chit-chat of the universe.
The key quantity that determines quality of any transmission is the signal-to-noise ratio.

A high ratio is the trumpet fanfare in William Tell Overture. You can’t miss the message. A low ratio is a viola solo at a Metallica concert – there’s just no way to hear it.

Scientists are always looking for signal in noise.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detects ripples in space-time caused by the movement of large masses. Finding a needle in a haystack is child’s play compared to detecting a gravitational wave.

LIGO measures differences in distance between mirrors by bouncing light between them. If a gravitational wave hits Earth, it will stretch space-time in one direction, and hopefully LIGO will see that small shift.

To obtain the necessary accuracy, LIGO measures the movements within a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. Did I mention the mirrors are two and a half miles apart?

The signal-to-noise ratio is tiny for LIGO. Because it wants to measure a miniscule effect, it has to control noise as much as possible. For instance, everything is done in a nearly perfect vacuum.

There’s nothing we can really do about noise.

Without earlids, there’s no way to shut it out. The world isn’t going to stop making it anytime soon.

The only thing we can do is improve our filter, isolate the sources of noise and irradiate them.

Then we can boost the signal-to-noise ratio in our lives.