How a Scientist’s Least Important Discovery Became His Most Famous

Heinrich Wilhelm Dove was a meteorologist who made great contributions to his field . He wrote over 300 paper , and help oneself found the scientific discipline of global clime study . But today , it ’s parapsychologists who get his work up the most .

Born into a Europe that was about to be rocked by Napoleon , Heinrich Wilhelm Dove was peaked and studious , but good - natured . Despite blow like the early dying of his father , he sailed swimmingly through his scholarly person year and into a educational activity position . He studied physics , but rather than fix himself table - top experiments , he was draw to large , complicated phenomenon . This meant that he was born at just the ripe time .

As he was coming into his own , in term of academic , a worldwide connection of meteoric stations was being countersink - up . scientist were share their information and standardise their instruments . Dove worked constantly , andproduced work on everything from magnetic attraction to the distribution of heat over the Earth . He even came up with a possibility , Drehungsgesetz , the “ theory of rotation , ” which noted the fact that wind tended to spread out counterclockwise in one hemisphere and clockwise in another , and posited a intellect for the essence . This work is often mentioned as an early version of the modern Coriolis Effect .

But he ’s most make out for a paper he published in 1839 . When Dove was around 35 years old and teaching in a junior-grade school , he notice an interesting phenomenon . He put a subject in a room . On one side of the room he placed a tuning fork , with a listening pipe that run from the fork to the subject ’s ear . On the other side of the elbow room he placed another tuning fork , and another tube , running up to the subject ’s other auricle . The two fork did n’t quite vibrate at the same frequency . One , for example , would resonate at 450 Hz and the other at 470 Heinrich Hertz . The subject could take heed the difference , but they could hear it as a combined sound — one slow beat , now know as a biaural beat .

Binaural beats were just a curiosity until the seventies , when Dr. Gerald Oster noticed that peoplevaried in sensitivity to biaural beatsand that people with some neurological conditions could n’t try them . Perhaps they could be used as a diagnostic tool . Since then , they ’ve blow up . mass suggest listening to binaural beats for get lucid dreaming , lessen pain , unlock creativeness , and even improve intimate experience . They are vend as meditation aids , intelligence boosters , and agency to treat hyperactivity . Heinrich Dove found the ultimate vogue in Modern years practice of medicine , 150 years before its clip .

Pity he did n’t think to market them in his day . Two tuning forks and two rubber thermionic valve could have netted him a luck .

Starship Test 9