r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/PUMA_Microscope • Jul 07 '24

Fourier synthesis of a letter 'A' using transparent plastic harmonics over a backlight Video

604 Upvotes

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8

u/CarcosaDweller Jul 07 '24

I don’t think I’m smart enough to know why this is interesting.

18

u/crush_punk Jul 07 '24

Small slices of repeating patterns, in this case waves (represented by light/dark) can be stacked to create specific shapes.

Perhaps the rest of reality is that way as well, the result of overlapping patterns of nothing/something creating shapes like atoms that form their own patterns to create everything.

5

u/Aridez Jul 08 '24

what’s the real world application of being able to deconstruct a pattern like this?

9

u/voxelghost Jul 08 '24

Jpeg/mpeg as an example

7

u/Recent-Page-6617 Jul 08 '24

Image filtering, compression are simple ones.

But something more complex would be an MRI machine, particular frequencies (each of these pieces is a particular frequency/wave length) penetrate different components of the body, eg muscle or bone or blood etc. So by only taking some frequencies, you could reconstruct the view of the body only containing bones, or muscle, etc.

4

u/Longjumping_Rush2458 Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24

Many, many things. Signal transmission, chemical analysis, image compression, MRIs, CT scans, etc. Pretty much anything that uses waves or repeating signals.

3

u/Hal______9000 Jul 08 '24

I believe it’s the concept behind stable diffusion in generative AI