big-sibby-lorie

[vargaslovinghours]

It’s all fun and games until you get a bad ending

[badbackgroundscience]

“Only women like shiny things.” - Hank Pym, paraphrased

I’m a bit of a Eurovision fan, I must admit. Last year’s was my first; I’ve since gone back and seen most of the acts for the past decade or so and own the corresponding albums. This year I’m keeping up to date with most things and enjoy getting confused by reviewers who like the songs I don’t. 

Why am I telling you this? Well, if I just came out and said reading this issue of Tales to Astonish got a seemingly random 2012 Moldovan song called “Lăutar” stuck in my head it’s basically going to mean absolutely nothing to any of you. Now, it’ll make a sliver of sense to maybe one of you. The title is Romanian for musician, deriving from the word for lute. The instrumental star of the song, however, is the trumpet. The chorus:

You have never been to my show You haven’t seen before how looks the trumpet But the sound goes straight to your soul Gets you out of control This trumpet makes you my girl 

Where does that sliver of sense come in? The baddie of the week hypnotizes people by playing, you guessed it...

Our trumpeter’s name is Trago, a man fired for trying to steal the cash box at one of his jazz gigs; rather than press charges, his boss puts him on a one way flight to India. Over several months Trago trains with the mystic Ghazandi, who teaches the musician how to use his instrument to hypnotize a cobra, and then humans (The mystic can read his mind to know of his past failed robbery but not know that he clearly wants to use the upgraded powerset for nefarious purposes? Okay, Stan...). When Trago makes it back to the States, he hypnotizes a bunch of guys to be in his band (slash loot for him) and then goes about freezing people with his magic trumpet that produces “notes no human has ever heard before”.

Hypnotizing musical instruments are nothing new, of course. But can sound you can’t hear really make you hallucinate? This is BadBackgroundScience, where I try not to criticize or contemplate the powersets of heroes or villains because plenty of other people already do that, but I was reminded of a hypothesis that infrasound - that is, sound at frequencies below the range of human hearing - could be partially to blame for feelings that a place is haunted.*

One 2003 ‘study’ played infrasound during a live music concert (They used a sewer pipe basically as a large organ pipe, producing a sound at 17 Hz**, which is about 3 Hz below the the human hearing threshold). During songs with added infrasound, there was a 22% increase in reports of ‘weird’ feelings, such as "shivering on my wrist, an odd feeling in the stomach, increased heart rate, feeling very anxious, a sudden memory of an emotional loss" (After each song, whether infrasound was played or not, the 750 audience members each filled out a survey. Over the two nights a single song both had and did not have infrasound playing, to make sure it wasn’t the song itself that invoked certain feelings.)

On the other hand, another research group attempted to build their own ‘haunted house’ with intermittent infrasound, but did not find increased feelings of unease when it was played versus when it wasn’t. For ethics reasons, the study participants had to be told that they might feel “anomalous sensations” before entering the room, so any of the feelings described could easily have been due to the “nocebo effect” (which is exactly like the placebo effect, but for bad things).

Neither or those studies, of course, suggests infrasound can cause you to hallucinate a ghost. According to an old NASA Technical Report (#19770013810, if you’re really that curious) the resonant frequency of the human eyeball is 18 Hz, so if you happen to have some sound being produced at that frequency, it might cause your eyes to vibrate, smearing your vision, and therefore make you think you see something in your periphery. (Here’s one particular anecdote. Please note that anecdotes do not count as scientific evidence.)

That’s completely different from “miasmic images” generated by a trumpet. Also, given a trumpet’s size (specifically, its length), its standard “low note” is the very much audible 164.8 Hz (The E key below middle C on your piano), but you can actually get much lower sounds out of them. They’re called “pedal tones” and they don’t sound particularly musical. I asked my university band director what the lowest note a really good trumpet player could get out of their instrument is; he hasn’t gotten back to me yet, but when he does I’ll let you know.

So let’s move on to the actual background part of this BadBackgroundScience post...

Ant-Man and Wasp actually learn about the source of Trago’s powers - rather, the man who taught Trago his powers - in the comic’s open, wherein they thwart a diamond robbery. The owner of the “Star of Ghana” (the “largest precious gem in the world”, according to Janet) mentions Ghazandi’s human-hypnotizing abilities, but adds that he never uses them because, if he accidentally plays the wrong note, he’ll lose all his powers.

In the real world, the largest faceted*** diamond in 1963 would have been the “Great Star of Africa”, otherwise known as Cullinan I. It came from a mine now within the borders of South Africa (so, not Ghana), and is currently sitting in the Tower of London with the Crown Jewels, specifically inside the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross. Its longest dimension is 5.9 cm (2.3 in), and it weighs about 106 grams (530.2 carats, for the gemologists among you).

Here it is in comparison to Cullinan II, the second-largest stone carved from the rough Cullinan Diamond, and a 1-carat diamond:

In 1986 the Cullinan I was surpassed in size by the Golden Jubilee Diamond, currently owned by the King of Thailand. It’s 109.13 g (545.67 carats), and yellow-brown in color (hence the name), so the Cullinan I is still the largest clear faceted diamond in the world.

But diamonds aren’t the only “precious” stones - rubies, sapphires****, and emeralds are, too.*****

The largest (non-rough) sapphire is the Star of Adam, weighing in at 1404.49 carats - nearly 3 times the weight of Cullinan I. [Note: diamond and sapphire do not have the same density - a sapphire that weighs the same as a diamond will be physically smaller] But the gem is not faceted - it’s a “Star Sapphire”`*, so it’s polished into a dome shape - and isn’t necessarily considered “gem-quality”. If it’s not, we turn to the Black Star of Queensland, which is 733 carats.`**

If you’re looking for gem-quality, faceted blue sapphires, the largest might be the Blue Giant of the Orient, weighed for auction back in 2004 as 486.52 carats. Here are some fingers for scale:

Red sapphires - aka “rubies” - also come in “star” varieties. There’s also, I feel I should mention, a "5 inch, 4 pound” ruby Liberty Bell, studded with diamonds (Guess how many) that was stolen back in 2011; while the robbers were apprehended, the stone was never recovered.`***

So, you can see that these “precious gems” aren’t always cut into jewelry (or other such ornamental) pieces. You’ll also note that when they get really big, these minerals lose their transparency - that’s simply because the atoms that make up the minerals aren’t always grown/arranged in a perfect, repeating crystalline pattern - with a larger size, more errors get made, so light can’t pass through it as easily.

And that’s part of why the Bell - as heavy as it is, is no where near as valuable as the most expensive ruby: the Sunrise Ruby, which weighs only 5.1 g (25.59 carats) and was bought at auction for 30.42 million dollars. The Bell, meanwhile, was only worth about a couple million. (As a comparison, the most expensive sapphire sold at auction was nearly 400 carats and bought for about 18 million dollars.)

So more expensive (and expensiveness somewhat correlates with “precious”ness, or at least our idea of it) does not equal bigger, but I have to step back and show you the largest emerald ever found, because it’s huge:

This is the Bahia Emerald, and it weighs in at about 341 kilograms (752 pounds)! It’s also in a lot of legal trouble, and has been locked up in LA County for many years, now. You can read more about it, here.

I don’t think most of you would look at that hunk of rock (’hunk of rock’, of course, is a technical term) and call it a “precious gem”. I certainly don’t. But that’s because the value of a gemstone is completely made up by society - by marketing campaigns (*cough* chocolate diamonds *cough*) and by how much people are willing to buy them for - and based on their appearance and perceived rarity.`****

But the crystals these “precious gems” are made of have really cool applications outside of adorning people’s necks and fingers and scepters and museums and whatnot - rubies are used in lasers; diamonds are used to study what happens at the center of the planets; the mineral that makes up emeralds - beryl - is the second most common source of beryllium on Earth, which we’ve used to make the mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope.

It doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to be distracted by the shiny, though.

The comic ends with Trago hypnotizing the entire city (or so) by transmitting his hypnotic song over the radio, and Hank sneaking up to his trumpet and pulling on one of the slidy bits (also a technical term) that makes his song no longer work. In desperation, Trago starts playing random notes, and they just so happened to be the ones that make him lose his powers. 

He also loses all of his memories since the first time he had a gig (whenever that was), so Hank and Janet let him stay on the streets and make a life as a normal jazz trumpeter. 

A jazz trumpeter that probably doesn’t know anything about a little song competition taking place for the 8th time, over in London. Denmark won that year, out of 16 countries.

PS - Go Italy.

* You can learn a little more about this in the Science Vs episode covering ghosts.

** This would correspond to an out-of-tune C 4 octaves below middle C (In tune would be 16.352 Hz). For reference, the lowest note on your standard 88-key piano is the A above this note, with a frequency of 27.5 Hz.

*** Obviously, most gemstones that adorn jewelry and the like are all cut from larger stones. The original Cullinan diamond weighed 621.35 g (3,106.75 carats) - roughly 10 cm in its longest dimension - and was cut into 9 major stones (Cullinans I-IX) and 96 minor ones, leaving 1.8 g of tiny fragments. Why carve out so many diamonds and not walk around with one giant faceted rock? Imperfections, for one - the Cullinan had a dark spot in roughly the middle of it. Internal crystal defects, for two - carving it up intentionally from the start prevented it from accidentally cracking in the future. And sheer weight, for three.

The largest rough diamond ever found is not gem quality, but surprisingly not much bigger than the Cullinan. It’s called Sergio (found in Brazil), weighs only 61 more carats than it’s gem-quality cousin, and may have come from space. Sergio is a “carbonado” - an opaque black diamond, mostly made up of a bunch of tiny, individual carbon crystals agglomerated together, rather than one large one. 

[Side note to the footnote: black diamonds you find in jewelry aren’t likely to be carbonadoes, but merely ‘regular’ diamonds that have been heat treated or irradiated to become black.]

**** Sapphires and rubies are both made of the same mineral, called Corundum, but are differently colored due to elemental impurities. Rubies get their red from chromium atoms; blue sapphires are that color because of titanium and iron. Corundum is naturally (i.e. sans impurities) colorless.

***** The “precious” designation is completely arbitrary. Amethyst was considered precious up until the 19th century, when they found a lot of the mineral in South America. Meanwhile, diamonds never got downgraded - the company that has a monopoly on the mines to this day hoards their surplus to create an artificially low supply.

I’m also completely ignoring that different cultures can have different values for different gems/minerals. Here is a giant jade cabbage I came across in China. I don’t remember how much it cost, but it might have been a couple million CNY:

`* No, DC. Not that one...

`** Today I learned that the license for a single Getty Image of this rock with a hand for scale costs $175 bucks, minimum.

`*** The same company that made this Liberty Bell also carved Martin Luther King into a giant black sapphire, weighing just under 3300 carats.

`**** And the origin. Man-made gems are cheaper than their Earth-made equivalent, even though they are no different chemically. Companies with a vested interest in keeping the prices of gemstones high do everything they can to suggest that, because it hasn’t been in the ground for millions of years, a man-made diamond (or whatever) is not as “special”. They often call these stones “synthetic”, which while technically accurate it carries the connotation that they’re not real diamonds (or whatever), and they very much are. A man-made diamond might have different impurities (like metal atoms coming from the growing chamber), but it’s still a big carbon crystal just like one Mother Nature made.

Tales to Astonish #47 - Writers: Stan Lee & H.E. Huntley, Art: Don Heck

Photo credits:

Cullinan diamonds 

Black star sapphire, cropped from original by greylock CC BY-SA 2.0

Blue Giant of the Orient

Liberty Bell Ruby, taken from *ugh* the Daily Mail, of all places...

Bahia emerald screencap from NGC video, cropped

Lucky jade cabbage, all mine.