Materials scientists typically rely on their eyes to analyze data, but soon they could employ their ears as well. Setting the motions of molecules to music can help scientists identify hidden patterns in their data that might otherwise be too small, or occur over such short time scales that they’re easily missed by the human eye.
That’s the hope of Asegun Henry, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech. He has applied for a National Science Foundation grant to create an educational app that catalogues unique musical signatures for every element in the periodic table. He’s even setting them to music. No longer must we rely solely on words or diagrams to comprehend the differences between the molecular structure for solids, liquids, and gases. We can listen to them, too.
via Gizmodo
