The Water-Balloon Burst, the Sound Shell and the Sound of the Early Universe
Abstract
This outreach collection presents Malin Hess’s water-balloon burst experiment alongside a schematic animation of a cosmic sound shell and sonifications of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) acoustic spectrum. The materials illustrate an outward front, a persistent rim and a central wet patch as a qualitative visual analogy for the matter and radiation imprints of early-universe acoustic waves. The archive contains the original five-page report dated 23 September 2026; a 104-row measurement CSV; two analysis figures; a 22.834-second side-by-side animation; the 14-second cmb_peaks.wav and 20-second cmb_roar.wav sonifications; and CMBBigBangV3.mp3, a stereo mix by Malin Hess. A historical RSU Cosmic Origins working report, recovered from the supplied archive, is included as background context. The original report credits Claude (Anthropic) for AI assistance. The comparison is illustrative and exploratory. It is not a quantitative cosmological experiment, a model of global cosmic expansion, or part of the preregistered P1-H audit record. The audio is a constructed sonification, not a recording of primordial sound. The original phone recording, image-analysis code, CAMB parameter file and sonification code were not supplied, so full computational reproduction is not claimed. The package preserves all nine unique supplied research and media files without alteration and adds a README, data dictionary, review and provenance notes, citation metadata and SHA-256 checksums. The notes distinguish absolute CSV times from time since the burst, explain interval-dependent summaries, and identify inconsistencies in the historical supporting report. Released as version 1.0.0 under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
