Day 134: Extraterrestrial Radio Signal Received!

College-Prep Physics: I used Newsjack.in to create a fake NPR news page about receiving a message from ET. I told the class astronomers had cracked the code and that we could “listen” to it. I played them this audio file I made:

• Did you get any useful information from that message?
• Describe the message. What did you hear?
• Transcribe the message. Do you see a pattern? How can we decode it?
• How many different tones are there? How many sounds all together?
• Might it be a word? A picture? Why/why not?
• How are digital photos encoded? What do you see when you enlarge a digital photo?
• How many different grid configurations will yield 35 squares?
• What’s special about 5 and 7? Why 35 total sounds instead of 36?
• Decode the message for both possible arrangements. Which one yields a message?  What about the other one?
• Is this message real? How do you know?

Then we looked at the radio message sent from Arecibo into space in 1974. Can you try to decode it?

Conceptual Physics: Chapter 12 quiz (magnets and electromagnetic induction)