What do we mean by Crackling?

Pencils	Fire	Popcorn

Choose for yourself! Which one crackles?

Wood pencils, when bent, break in one loud SNAP.

Popcorn, when heated, explodes in lots of small POPS, all about the same size.

Fire CRACKLES. Something about the way the flame eats into the wood happens in bursts. The bursts come in all sizes: lots of small ones, some medium sized ones, and a few big ones. We hear all these bursts as crackling noise.

Rice Krispies^TM Paper Earthquakes Magnets

Scientists have just started to think about crackling noise in the past few years. We have studied the crackling noise from crumpling paper and from magnets. Just for you, we've recorded the crackling noise in Rice Krispies^TM. Our friends have studied how the earth crackles - giving earthquakes.

Our site will start by exploring some examples of what we call crackling noise. We will suggest some simple demonstrations, plus a couple of more sophisticated experiments. We'll let you run some of the same computer models that the science community has developed for studying various things that crackle. And we'll show you some of the results of our supercomputer runs!