rength of a sound wave. In this fascinating and unnerving paper, some doctors report the effects of 62,000-pascal blast waves on rats. They speak of “minimal to mild alveolar hemorrhages,” as though there were such a thing as a mild case of bleeding fucking lungs. The upshot of all this is that, although 150 dB may burst your eardrums, 189.9 decibels (which is the decibel equivalent of 62,000 pascals overpressure) can actually damage your guts.
But if you’re catching a 190-decibel blast, you’ve got more serious things to worry about than bleeding lungs. Yes, really. There are a lot of reports of soldiers who have been hit by blasts from roadside bombs and car bombs and other such nasty things. Some of these soldiers, although they didn’t hit their heads on anything and nothing hit them in the head, developed serious cognitive problems: difficulty concentrating and short-term memory loss, enough to pretty much spoil their day-to-day lives. In another experiment, rats exposed to a blast overpressure of 20 kilopascals (180 decibels) experienced similar symptoms, and when they were dissected, had lots of dying brain cells. Which is all really pretty damn sad.
As it turns out, there’s actually technically a maximum sound pressure, at least if you want an undistorted sound wave. A pure tone has the shape of a sine wave: the pressure rises a certain amount above atmospheric, drops in a graceful sinusoidal curve, falls that same amount below atmospheric pressure, returns to atmospheric pressure, rinse and repeat. The thing about these kinds of sine waves is that, after their maximum overpressure, they have to drop that far below atmospheric pressure. And if the sound pressure of your sine wave happens to be greater than atmospheric pressure, that can’t happen: pressure is a number that doesn’t go any lower than zero, which is a vacuum. So a sine wave with a sound pressure larger than 1013 hectopascals (1 atmosphere) will sound all right when the pressure goes up, but will get cut off (“clipped,” the sound-engineer people call it) when it goes down. (And when I say “Will sound all right” I mean “Will rupture your aorta, destroy your lungs, tear your limbs off, and knock your house down,” as we learned from nuclear tests.) The maximum for unclipped sound, therefore, is 194.1 decibels.
But since we’re already blowing everything up, why worry about a little distortion? You know the Barrett M82? The big-ass .50-caliber sniper rifle? That one from that movie The Hurt Locker? The big scary one? Well, when that thing fires, its cartridge sees a blast wave of 265.5 decibels, which is just one more reason not to live in a rifle barrel.
You would experience 270 decibels if you were standing about 100 meters (350 feet) from a 1-megaton nuclear bomb when it went off. I use “experience” loosely here, since you wouldn’t have long to enjoy the racket before you were spread over an alarmingly large area.
Now, let’s say you were standing on the surface of a star just as it went supernova. Well, you’d be exposed to a blast pressure of something in the (very rough) neighborhood of 476 decibels, which I’m pretty sure the EPA would classify as “potentially hazardous.”
As it turns out, there’s a maximum pressure that is still physically meaningful, at least according to our current understanding of physics. It’s called the Planck Pressure, and it’s very large. It’s the kind of pressure you get inside black holes. It’s the kind of pressure the universe experienced (we think) right after the Big Bang. The Big Bang had a noise rating of 2,367.3 decibels. The explosion that set the current universe in motion had a pressure which can be quantified in five significant digits.
That’s what I mean about logarithmic scales being awesome. They turn unimaginable cosmic numbers into nice, manageable, comprehensible numbers. You’d better believe I’m going to be playing with logarithmic scales again soon. Which sounds way dirtier than I intended.