Schumann Resonance For Gurus (part 1)
Some clarification on what the Schumann Resonance is and is not doing for those who are bewitched, bothered and bewildered.
Every month or so New Age gurus get in a bit of a flap over the Schumann Resonance. One of my Facebook friends will post something they’ve seen and, try as I might, I can’t seem to bite my tongue! What it always boils down to is the strange claim that the Schumann Resonance is increasing in frequency, though sometimes there are claims of mysterious energy surges that are blowing the resonance sky high. I’ll try to explain what is actually happening in a pithy para, and I’ll throw in a pleasant slide for good measure. Sometimes I’ll annotate charts to help folk understand what they’re looking at. The pleasure I get when the penny drops for FB friends is as good as a fresh-made Madeira cake, and especially so if their inner anxiety turns to outer smiles.
Readers of Private Passion will have already seen one of those pleasant slides back in Flat Earth Frolic when I provided a table for the first six harmonics (modes) of the Schumann Resonance. Today I’m going to walk freshly churned subscribers through some basics and will hopefully clear up any misunderstanding with gentle guiding of the spiritually-minded in mind. The cosmos is wonderfully wacko enough without getting batshut crazy, and in this regard I shall remind us all of what yer big-thinking bloke Werner Heisenberg once said:
"Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think."
Now that’s a pretty far out statement, so grab a hot coffee1 and let us start with an example of well-meant but rather unfortunate misunderstanding:
You can find the source for these screenshots here. Let me now explain what is really going on…
Ionosphere
The Earth is a globe of hard stuff, not so hard stuff and wet stuff. Resting on top like aspic jelly is the atmosphere which comprises many and varied layers. Right at the top is a layer called the ionosphere, this being a region full of ions (does what it says on the tin) that stretches from 48km to 965km above sea level. Ions are charged particles that have come about by gaseous stuff being zapped by solar radiation (think in terms of snooker with the billiard ball hurtling in from the sun to break the reds apart). Plasma is the buzzword here and this fizzy stuff high above us has many interesting properties one of which is the storage and conduction of electrical charge, the other being the ability to propagate electromagnetic waves such as radio waves.
Raspberry Jelly
One curious thing about the ionosphere is that it resonates in a rather complex manner, with several factors coming into play. Whenever I come across the word ‘resonate’ in physics I tend to think in terms of a fruit jelly for, as a young sprocket, I utterly loved jelly and had the good fortune of possessing a Lego set big and fancy enough to make a jelly wobble tester.
I can’t find any trace of the Lego jelly wobble tester advert online but it was essentially a powered windmill with arms that whacked a fruit jelly that then vibrated. Ten seconds in and I was writing to Santa. Here’s a Chambord raspberry jelly doing its thing:
See that slow wobble? I reckon that jelly is taking 15 seconds to undertake 17 wobble cycles, this giving us a resonant frequency of 1.13Hz. The ionosphere does similar when perturbed by electrical discharges such as lightning strikes or when it gets walloped by solar activity and we call this wobble the Schumann Resonance (SR). But let us now set the jelly aside and take a sip of brandy…
Brandy Glass BING!
OK, so here is a very large brandy glass that I usually reserve for use after Christmas dinner and I am going to whack it with a wooden spoon:
BING indeed! That angelic ringing sound that you hear is analogous to the SR. I’ve whacked a glass bowl with a wooden spoon to produce an audible tone, whilst above our heads lightning strikes and other stuff is whacking the ionosphere 24/7/365, and the ionosphere is responding by ringing and singing with a series of electrical ‘tones’ in a similar manner.
Before we go on to consider the frequencies of these SR ‘tones’ let’s have a look at the waveform of that brandy glass bing using Adobe Audition:
In the top screenshot we see the amplitude of the bing thing over time as it would appear on an oscilloscope, and we see the sound level decay to background noise over about 4 seconds. In the bottom screenshot I’ve zoomed in to the 1.5 second mark to reveal a near-perfect sine wave – this is the ‘ooooooo’ sound after the initial TING!
What we need to do now is ogle the spectrogram of this sound, this being a visual representation of all the frequencies present in the signal:
Along the bottom axis is time running from zero to 3 seconds and up the side is frequency running from 500Hz to 10,000Hz. Those white and yellow bands mark out several frequency components whose precise values we’ll get to gawp at in the next screenshot. Please remember this structure because we’ll see the same situation when it comes to looking at SR traces from Tomsk.
My eyeballs count five significant bands starting out at around 650Hz. Note that the higher frequencies peter out quite quickly leaving just the fundamental sounding at the 3 second mark. Here’s the same signal run through frequency analysis:
My eyeballs again suggest a total of 5 main peaks, each representing a frequency that is present within the bing thing. Complex innit?
That bing is a weird and wonderful mix, make no mistake, and right over at the far left we can see the lowest significant frequency present (fundamental) being estimated at 646Hz. The brandy glass rings sweetly for sure but it is no musical instrument for its complex shape produces a wacko series of harmonics (sometimes called overtones). Here they are:
The main point to take away from part 1 of this miniseries is that whacking something generates a whole series of harmonics that go to make the characteristic sound we hear and it is exactly the same with SR, except that we’re talking about electric field resonance following a whack to the ionosphere. When it comes to the SR forget all that single frequency blah blah blah of 7.83Hz back in 1954 and start thinking about a frequency series starting out at 7.83Hz just like our brandy glass starts out at 646Hz.
Kettle On!
Particularly so for those bods reading from over the pond.
Wouldn’t it be fun to lay out six (full) brandy glasses, then drink each one down by the amount needed to yield the standard guitar tuning E(2), A, D, G, B, and E(4). It’s conceivable you might need a bigger glass to achieve the range, but some experimentation may be needed to determine that.
I’m reading a little late for coffee, more like herbal lemon ginger. Is the brandy glass table of overtones intended to have entries below the headings? Not showing for me.