If you turn on your television and tune it between stations, about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe. What grater proof of the reality of the Big Bang–you can watch it on TV.
Yes, it wouldn’t be peaked at about 3 GHz. Since television only goes up to about 1 GHz, this means more noise at higher channels after accounting for other sources.
Selecting a channel is tuning; each channel has a specific frequency and the TV knows what frequencies the channel numbers stand for. But what you can’t do is tune to a frequency that isn’t assigned to any channel, so you would have to select a channel on which no station in your area is broadcasting.
You would have to be using an analog TV tuner (which is now obsolete, if you’re in the US); digital TV has a much less direct relationship between received radio photons and displayed light photons. On the upside, it’s really easy to find a channel where no station is broadcasting, now :) (though actually, I don’t know what the new allocation of the former analog TV bands is and whether there would be anything broadcasting on them).
(I’ve recently gotten an interest in radio technology; feel free to ask more questions even if you’re just curious.)
Jim Holt
Would the static look any different if it was 0% though?
Yes, it wouldn’t be peaked at about 3 GHz. Since television only goes up to about 1 GHz, this means more noise at higher channels after accounting for other sources.
There would be less?
Can you actually do this experiment on a modern TV? I know how to change the channels on mine, but I have no idea how you would “tune” it.
Selecting a channel is tuning; each channel has a specific frequency and the TV knows what frequencies the channel numbers stand for. But what you can’t do is tune to a frequency that isn’t assigned to any channel, so you would have to select a channel on which no station in your area is broadcasting.
You would have to be using an analog TV tuner (which is now obsolete, if you’re in the US); digital TV has a much less direct relationship between received radio photons and displayed light photons. On the upside, it’s really easy to find a channel where no station is broadcasting, now :) (though actually, I don’t know what the new allocation of the former analog TV bands is and whether there would be anything broadcasting on them).
(I’ve recently gotten an interest in radio technology; feel free to ask more questions even if you’re just curious.)
This grater.
?
S/he is making a pun of the typo: “what grater proof...” instead of “what greater proof...”. (I don’t find it a very funny pun myself.)