

Darpa has come up with a way to put out fires with sound waves - mactac
http://www.noisemademedoit.com/extinguish-fire-with-sound/

======
pohl
Some of us believe in historical determinism. I'd argue that sound waves would
be putting out fires in 2012 whether or not the government put money into it.

 _Edit: I'm sorry, this was a poor attempt to joke about some of the
sentiments seen in the recent Vint Cerf thread regarding the article in the
WSJ_

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295786>

~~~
retr0rocket
but this is bullshit, in almost all of the sciences we advanced because of
someone who had more insight then anyone else, if any one of those stumbled we
might not of gotten anywhere close to what we have today.

what if edison has succeded and we built a bunch of dc waystations across the
entire country would we ever consider switching to AC? what if all the
railway/trolley companies werent destroyed by the car/oil companies? what if
we recounted bush vs gore would 9/11 still have happened? if Hitler's mom
aborted would Germany still have turned out militant? what if einstein died in
the holocaust and no one figured out general relativity till 50 years later?
what if sony never broke with Nintendo and we ended up with a console monopoly
by Nintendo?

historical determinism is bullshit spewed by people who cant create and try to
bring down the accomplishments of others. just because you cant contribute
shit doesn't mean other people wont.

edit: sorry, people that actually believe historical determinism piss me off

~~~
nitrogen
If Hitler hadn't been born, you would still have Mussolini and Stalin.

If Edison had succeeded, we could never have had anything like a national grid
because DC transmission was too inefficient until long after the invention of
the transistor.

Einstein was only one of several scientists working on theoretical physics
near the turn of the 20th century; he didn't go from cave painting to special
relativity all on his own.

The rest of your examples have nothing to do with scientific advancement.

You should read _What Technology Wants_. The first chapter or two contains a
few leaps of logic, but the rest of the book makes a compelling case for
emergent behavior leading to most of our scientific results.

~~~
retr0rocket
but no holocaust and Mussolini/stalin were fuck ups, stalin only got power
because of sheer population and being on the winning side.

EXACTLY we would of had a shitty inefficient grid because edison had a
stranglehold at the time, this would of pushed back everything.

when einstein came up with special reliativity it was dubbed only 3 other
people could understand it and no one else could of came up wit hit, he sped
up the field by who knows ho many years.

so many of the world events were based on little things, and if we kept using
electrical trolleys are knowledge of systems like that would of been much
better.

------
WestCoastJustin
Wonder if they use a similar technique to putting out oil well fires, albeit
on a much smaller/controlled scale. "Typically high explosives, such as
dynamite, are used to consume all the local atmospheric oxygen and snuff the
flame out." [1] Granded, they are not using dynamite, but if they can
duplicate the displacement of oxygen it could probably work.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well_fire#Extinguishing_the_fires)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I wondered the same thing, and then I started wondering if you set up an
infrasonic standing wave, what sort of pressure differential could you
maintain? Could you drop the pressure in the nodal low spots down by a
millibar? 10? 20!?

That started me down the path of trying to figure out how much energy transfer
was there in a standing wave and rather than run down the physics rabbit hole
yet again, went back to work.

~~~
ars
Don't you, by definition, have to drop the pressure by exactly as much as your
raise it?

Meaning just use the DB of the sound, and calculate the sound pressure.

------
taurussai
This is actually a problem in land based gas turbines that are used for power
production. A neat application to putting out sound waves.

------
pavel_lishin
I wonder, what's the biggest fire that this could put out? And how much the
placement of speakers matters?

I can imagine in 20 years, fire departments having pick-up trucks with huge
speaker cones driving around to put out fires.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Or not having fire departments at all; speakers in your home for your home
automation system (with Siri and Google Now plugged) would be used to put the
fire out from the inside.

Your home is going to be like a deck on the Enterprise sooner than you think.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Sure, but that won't help put out car fires, etc.

I do look forward to having fire-proof homes that incidentally have amazing
sound systems built into the walls.

------
evilbit
i can already see sysop geeks setting up budget for massive sound systems in
the dc. y'know, for fire protection...

------
eli_gottlieb
And it was called the Sonic Screwdriver.

