Water damping is thousands of times stronger than air damping

Evidence

Helmholtz knew as well as anyone at the time about damping of pendula and oscillators, but it failed to dampen his enthusiasm for his resonance theory. The hair cells are made of protoplasm swimming in fluid, the damping due to water is thousands of times stronger than in air. The hair cells cannot be high-Q, purely mechanical oscillators, which if set in motion and left alone would oscillate many times before losing most of their energy. (The Q of oscillators, damping, and resonance was discussed in chapter 9). A hair cell vibrating back and forth or up and down under no power seems less plausible than an underwater lyre—the damping is just too strong. You can pluck the strings, but they would vibrate at most a couple of times and come to rest. As a crude test of the damping power of water as compared to air, the author submerged his ukelele and recorded the result of strumming with an underwater microphone. The resulting “thunk-like” sounds had an average Q of about 3, as opposed to thousands in air. — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 1982

Categorization

• CANDY: The author submerged his ukulele and recorded a Q of roughly 3 vs thousands in air — a delightfully absurd, tweetable experiment.