Imagine if there was no music. That’d be a terrible world. Or perhaps imagine if everything made the most annoying sound in the world.
When we make machines, we make them for a purpose, to do a thing. But sometimes we forget about or neglect the things it’s not made for. Then you end up with phone or laptop chargers with transformers that buzz like a fridge. Typical human nature: we do one thing and mess up another in the process.
But we can also change this narrative. In fact, there’s a train that sets a great example of what we should aim for.
Have you been to London and rode a Jubilee line train? When they set off, they sound like they’re travelling into the future.
Why do they sound unique? I looked into it. You’d think it’s a gear change, but it’s not. It turns out it comes from another engineering solution: in particular, the electronics. The motors are AC-powered, but they’re supplied with DC, so you need to rectify that. For these trains, they used a kind of thyristor—a kind of switchable diode for current. They have a switching frequency, and so the system with the electrical inverters making that happen sound off at that frequency. And since you have to ramp up the torque gradually as you set off (you wouldn’t floor it in a Porsche if you turned off traction control!), the frequency changes with it. On top of that, there’s different ranges of frequencies as you ramp it up, and so you get ‘gear changes’. I know very little all about this, so that’s as far as I try to comprehend it—it’s probably wrong, but that’s not the point I’m setting up.
There’s another train that took this idea a step further: the Siemens ES64U2 (Taurus), from Austria and Germany. It’s actually engineered to produce a musical scale as it sets off!
When the engineers realised you could program the switching frequency of the inverters, they set them such that the train plays a musical scale as it sets off. There’s not necessarily any need to make it play music: it’s not going to make the train go faster. But it’s pleasant. Subconsciously, it probably makes you feel better. This is a train built for humans.
Can we learn from this attitude and apply it to the physics lab? Often, the environment of quantum physics machines and experiments is usually harsh: heavy steel tables, cables everywhere, harsh light etc. Generally, making the machines work takes priority over making the work environment comfortable. Worse still, less accessible. It’s unlikely you’ll find someone with a physical disability in the lab, for example.
Perhaps a more comfortable, pleasant lab could make us work easier and better, then. It sounds obvious, but as I say, it’s not often the priority.
So, I’m thinking of adding some inspiration from Nature for my future experimental designs. Like how architecture is about engineering environments for humans, and we look to Nature for such examples as the Bosco Verticale. (Although that particular building has a separate discussion of gentrification around it, which I won’t go into). I won’t force it, but I’ll think of something…