Can the lid of a toilet make you deaf ?, that is, imagine that you have gone to the bathroom as you usually do every day and, when you finish, you are ready to close the lid and this, for one reason or another, as surely you will have once passed, it slips out of your hands and ends up hitting the toilet itself when closing. Can this sound make you deaf?
The answer to this is evidently no though, as the physicist seems to have Philip metzger from NASA, if it can damage your hearing system. Be that as it may and before going into more detail, perhaps that is one of the reasons behind the creation of those stoppers that make the lid close slowly.
A falling toilet seat and a physique nearly going deaf. For something similar Isaac Newton discovered gravity
Although all this may be quite difficult to believe, the truth is that it is totally true that Philip Metzger, because while he was fixing the cistern of his toilet it had broken down and he was fixing it, the lid of it fell off and ended up hitting the toilet itself. Curiously, the blow was such that, as the NASA physicist assures, he was stunned, enough to stumble out of the bathroom to fall to his knees in the living room.
Due precisely to this state and his curiosity as a scientist, when he began to recover, the first thing he did was test if he could hear well, a process in which he discovered that the hit of the cup had damaged his hearing system at certain frequencies.
How could this happen? A question Metzger has been able to answer
Once the physicist fully recovered, he decided to investigate how this accident could have occurred. The first step, as he explains it, went through find out the speed of sound in ceramic, material in which the toilet bowl was made and which is one 4.000 meters per second. Once this information was known, the next thing was to determine the sound frequency. For this, the scientist calculated the wavelength of the vibration that caused the lid to hit the cup.
Attending to the explanations, apparently and because the sound occurred in a limited medium such as the toilet seat, Metzger used the equation of standing waves. In this equation the frequency is equal to the velocity divided by the wavelength, but this wave had to travel from one end of the lid to the other and bounced back to get back to where it started. With this Metzger divided the velocity by the length of the cap and then divided the result by two to obtain the frequency, 3 kHz.
As the physicist has commented, apparently the main problem is that the toilet lid did not break when it fell, so almost all the energy of the impact ended up becoming sound. To this we must add that the lid was concave, which caused the same It acted as if it were an antenna by making all this energy focus directly towards Metzger's face. According to the physicist himself:
The pressure wave is strongest within the cochlea as a function of frequency. Because the toilet seat put all the energy into specific frequencies, it was concentrated at specific points in the cochlea. Apparently this concentration of energy was enough to damage the ear's receptors, and I was concerned that it might be permanent.
Proven, the hit of your toilet seat when falling can make you deaf
As you can see, it seems that it may be true that the lid of your toilet, when falling 'plumb'It can leave you deaf, but if the perfect blow occurs, as in this case, that is, it has to be fulfilled, as we can see, that the toilet and the lid are made of a certain material, that the forms of They are in a certain way and, above all, that you are located in a very specific point in the bathroom.
As for the physical, apparently and within the little luck he had to undergo this experience, the truth is that 48 hours after the domestic incident, her hearing began to improve since there was no permanent damage.
Further information: motherboard