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Acoustic Levitation: The Secret of the Pyramids and Ancient Megaliths

Universe Inside Yo

uin 1999 american journalist gail collins wrote a newspaper article asking the question which was on the minds of many at that point in time where is my flying car during the 20th century flying cars had become a staple of science fiction and pop culture an oft-used caricature for what the future would hold and yet at the turn of the millennium human beings were still firmly ground-bound driving gas guzzlers over cracked roads and getting stuck in the winter 20 years later and smartphones have assuaged technological apprehension somewhat but the question remains here is the good news flying cars as well as a litany of other futuristic technology previously seen only in the pages of science fiction are closer than we can imagine but it doesn't start with technological oligarchs or corporate innovation in fact it starts with the secrets of sound before we continue we'd like to thank our friends from skillshare for sponsoring this video skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more skillshare's mission is to close the professional skills gap and provide universal access to high quality learning i really like their calligraphy classes which teach you the ancient art of calligraphy together with their illustration classes which can help you bring to life all of your visions and ideas the first 1000 people who click the link in the description will get two months of free access explore thousands of classes and fuel your creativity and career with skillshare for an answer one might have to go further back into history to the writings of the 10th century arab historian abdul hassan al-masudi this was a man who spent his life traveling the globe eventually writing a 30-volume history of the world based on his adventures in this work al-masudi spoke in detail on egypt where he had spent much time and in fact where he had settled at the end of his journey one section stands out as particularly relevant where al-masudi explains how egypt's pyramids were built consider that even today scientists do not have a concrete explanation for how the pyramids were built how the 2.5 million blocks of stone weighing 2.5 tons each were moved and stacked without modern machinery many have suggested that it must have taken tens of thousands of slaves many decades moving stones by ropes and pulleys but al-masudi offered a different explanation one presumably directly from the mouths and the records of the egyptians who had become his compatriots he described how when they wanted to move a stone the ancient egyptians would place a piece of papyrus imprinted with unusual symbols under it from there they would strike a metal rod against the stone at which point it would levitate off the ground they would then guide the stone along a path fenced with additional metal rods until it fell then repeat the process until the stone was in its desired place in his book al-masudi wrote in carrying on the work leaves of papyrus or paper inscribed with certain characters were placed under the stones prepared in the quarries and upon being struck the blocks were moved at each time the distance of a bow shot which would be a little over 200 feet and so by degrees arrived at the pyramids hearing accounts like this draw attention to the numerous ancient structures on earth whose construction remains like the pyramids somewhat of a mystery think of stonehenge where the largest stones weigh 40 tons or easter island where the largest moai is 80 tons consider the non-medal on the island of panapei in micronesia the machu picchu of the pacific a lost city constructed in 200 bce using hundreds of stone logs each 18 feet long and several feet in diameter weighing 2.5 tons or what about the stone blocks at bailbeck in lebanon where the three biggest stones weigh an unbelievable 1 000 tons each shockingly these are not even the largest man-made stones on our planet an incredible discovery made in russia threatens to shatter conventional theories about the history of our planet in southern siberia researchers have found an absolutely massive wall of granite stones some of these gigantic granite stones are estimated to weigh more than 3 000 tons and many of them were cut with flat surfaces right angles and sharp corners nothing of this magnitude has ever been discovered before it has been pointed out that even the largest most powerful crane in existence today could not move these stones so how did an ancient civilization further why is it that in almost every culture where megaliths exist a legend also exists that huge stones were moved by acoustic means of course some secrets of the past we may never know forever the province of the ancients luckily this is not a phenomenon which remains locked in the past edward lead scalding was born in 1877 in riga latvia when in his early 20s his fiancee broke off their engagement only days before the wedding a heartbroken lead scaldin left latvia for north america he bounced around canada california and texas for a while before settling in the warm climate of florida after being diagnosed with tuberculosis there he began his life's work his incredible rock gate park this was a sprawling stone city made of more than 1 000 tons of coral rock stones weighing up to 35 tons each leetskallen made walls and towers one of which he lived in furniture and art out of the coral curiously lead scaldin never let anyone watch him work and many wondered how a five foot tall one hundred pound man with tuberculosis could have cut shaped lifted and maneuvered all that rock into place by himself consider in 1986 long after leed skalin's death the gate to the park which by then had been renamed coral castle and become a major tourist attraction broke and it took six men with a 45-ton crane to fix it for his part leed scalden never revealed his secrets saying only that he knew how to tune to the music of the stars and cryptically proclaiming i have discovered the secrets of the pyramids and have found out how the egyptians and the ancient builders in peru yucatan and asia with only primitive tools raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons during his life a number of curious stories about lead scalding began to emerge his neighbors reported that they had heard him singing to his coral while a group of teenagers swore they had seen him float coral blocks through the air like hydrogen balloons after his death a large stockpile of radio equipment was found deep within the castle as well as a tightly sealed soundproof room which some have speculated could have been used for sound experiments is it possible that the secrets of the pyramids of which leed skalin spoke were the same recorded by al-masudi in our video about the powers and abilities of buddhist monks which was curiously deemed inappropriate or offensive and also forcefully age restricted by youtube we mentioned the story of a mysterious swede known only as dr yarl who in the 1930s reached the end of a long journey deep into the heart of tibet traveling first by plane and then in a yak caravan across the mountainous terrain to a place where few westerners had ever been before years earlier as a young man studying at oxford university yarl had befriended a tibetan student with whom he had maintained a lifelong relationship it was this friend who had asked him begged him really to come to tibet to treat a prominent llama who had fallen ill an account of yarl's journey was published in a german magazine detailing his time in tibet and most specifically one extraordinary story according to yarl he was led one day to a meadow surrounded by high cliffs on one of these cliffs some 250 meters off the ground was a cave and the beginnings of what appeared to be a rock wall the locals were building but how yarl wondered with no way up to the ledge except perhaps by climbing a rope he noted with curiosity that sitting in the otherwise barren meadow was an enormous polished slab of rock with a bowl shape carved in the middle suddenly a procession of monks appeared carrying massive instruments huge iron drums and three meter long horns the monks used an ox to drag a substantial boulder onto the smooth slab of rock in the meadow then set their instruments up around it and began to play beating the iron drums with leather mallets and blowing their horns what followed shocked yarl as the account recorded when the stone was in position the monk behind the small drum gave a signal to start the concert the small drum had a very sharp sound and could be heard even with the other instruments making a terrible din all the monks were singing and chanting a prayer slowly increasing the tempo of this unbelievable noise during the first four minutes nothing happened then as the speed of the drumming and the noise increased the big stone block started to rock and sway and suddenly it took off into the air with an increasing speed in the direction of the platform in front of the cave hole 250 meters high after three minutes of ascent it landed on the platform amazed y'all watched the monks repeat this process over and over again moving five or six boulders every hour as the rock wall slowly grew he could not believe his own eyes assuming he must have been hypnotized or drugged or otherwise fooled so he set up a camera to record the process watching it back later he saw exactly what he thought he'd seen bolder and bolder levitated as if by magic curiously when yarl returned to europe the scientific society which had sponsored his trip confiscated his videos and they subsequently disappeared years later the question remains what was on those tapes was yarl hypnotized or hallucinating or did these tibetan monks possess some sort of secret knowledge which allowed them to hurl boulders through the air was leed scowlin's music of the stars the same witnessed by dr yarl in tibet good news these are not questions without answers not questions relegated to the realm of myth and legend in fact they are now firmly in the arena of science it's called acoustic levitation that is when sound is used to counteract the force of gravity simply when sound waves bounce off of a surface the interaction between the compressions and rarefactions created causes interference occasionally reflections and interference will combine to create what is called a standing wave these are sound waves which appear to vibrate rather than traveling from place to place hence standing wave crucially when the orientation of a standing wave is parallel to the pull of gravity the effect is levitation these standing waves can be created using an acoustic levitator a device made up of a transducer a vibrating surface that creates sound and a reflector the surface the waves will be reflecting off of think back to the monks described by yarl their transducer was the drums and horns their reflector was the smooth slab of rock with its concave surface importantly to achieve acoustic levitation the transducer and reflector must be a precise distance apart and the waves produced of a specific frequency this was why yarl's monks used drums and horns of specific sizes down to the centimeter and why as yarl's accounts described the monks carefully measured the distance from the stone to this quarter circle of instruments and it came out to 63 meters eight of the 13 drums were exactly the same size as the stone a meter wide and a meter and a half long four of the drums were smaller in size but were exactly one-third the volume of the larger drum at 0.7 meters wide and one meter long one additional drum was the smallest at 0.2 meters wide and 0.3 meters long again in perfect harmonic proportion you could fit 41 of the small drums into the medium drum in volume and 125 into the larger drum put succinctly by author bruce cathy the secret is in the geometric placement of the musical instruments in relation to the stones to be levitated and the harmonic tuning of the drums and trumpets what this all means is that the science behind the levitating stones of yarl and al-masudi is now well established so well established in fact that modern scientists have started to take it much further than just moving stones in the early 2000s scientists began to levitate small droplets of water with sound a starry eyed foray into the official study of acoustic levitation research plateaued however when scientists could not figure out a way to move the particles once they were levitated as one scientist described if they pushed too hard the water droplet would explode not hard enough it would fall with gravity then finally in 2013 a team of researchers led by deimos pulikakos a mechanical engineer at the swiss federal institute of technology had a stunning breakthrough after four years of continuous effort they created a system a checkerboard style setup with multiple vibrating plates each generating its own frequency which allowed them to precisely control the lateral movement of liquid droplets while keeping them floating smoothly in mid-air the researchers used their creation to move different droplets and particles towards each other until they coalesced into one cheekily they mixed instant coffee and water they were even able to spin a toothpick around an object much larger than had previously been possible before coming to this discovery pulikakos described the plight of scientists levitating droplets with acoustic levitation as like we had a car which we had made fancier and fancier but it stayed parked we were never able to drive with his team's discovery scientists were able to in effect take this car out for a test drive so where would they go that is what might be possible to start many have suggested that this technology could have huge implications for the manufacturing sector picture contactless production lines goods produced and moved no matter how fragile without ever being touched without concern for contamination no matter how hazardous the materials further this technology is beginning to get applied to the field of medicine for example a group of british researchers developed so-called acoustic tweezers which could be used to move cartilage cells from a petri dish and implant them in people who had sustained tendon or ligament damage in effect molding a string of cartilage cells into precisely the right shape inside a person's body using sound this might be applied to bones or even tissue a new method of futuristic regeneration one which moves beyond invasive surgery these are incredible applications in the fields of manufacturing and medicine but in fact it goes even further one might say it boldly goes where no one has gone before in 2018 a group of researchers at northwestern university began using acoustic levitation technology to create meta materials that is materials that didn't otherwise exist in nature much as pulley caucus and his team did with water and coffee the northwestern researchers would control and combine the properties of individual particles assembling in essence any configuration they could imagine one such work of their imagination was to combine dna with gold nanoparticles creating an entirely new material which could incredibly bend incoming light around it making it appear invisible in other words it appeared they had created the cloaking technology seen previously in the annals of star trek elsewhere that very same year researchers at the university of bristol discovered a way to lift larger objects with acoustic levitation previously researchers had not been able to lift anything larger than the sound wave itself bristol researchers overcame this by creating a system of rapidly fluctuating acoustic vortices that is a series of tiny sound tornadoes a twister of loud sounds surrounding an inner and completely silent core as described when a sound field rotates in any direction some of its spin carries over to affect the motion of the levitating object inside it making such an object orbit faster and faster until it becomes out of control and the experiment fails but by switching the direction of the spin back and forth at high speeds balancing it through opposing forces the researchers found the sound tornado could hold an object stable this let them make the tornado's silent core even bigger ultimately trapping a sphere just under an inch across it's the largest object ever stabilized by a tractor beam by increasing the size of the core at the center of the tornado larger objects could be lifted in this case a sphere just under an inch across but presumably even human beings which is why the invention has been dubbed an acoustic tractor beam indeed one could imagine it being applied to lift a human off the ground but one might imagine it going beyond that not as a tractor beam deployed from some floating ship but as the power source of the ship itself consider that the records of many ancient civilizations those who have built inexplicable structures of heavy stone contain depictions of flying machines which flew through the air with a melodious sound consider the stereotypical depiction of the ufo in science fiction a flying disc with a circle in the middle appearing at first glance not entirely unlike the huge polished and concave rock of ural's monks perhaps these flying machines were in fact acoustic levitation devices where's my flying car it is not an entirely unreasonable question in a world where phones are smarter than humans and billionaires shoot rockets to mars and yet perhaps the flying cars and many other pieces of technological wizardry seen only in science fiction were here all along perhaps we just needed to listen to the music of the stars