Particle Physicists may solve JFK murder mystery

[irishgrl]

Has anyone seen the latest (March) issue of Reader's Digest? Two particle physicists may be able to solve a decades long controversy: Were there 3 shots fired (as the Warren commission said) or 4 shots (Congressional inquiry by the House Select Committee on Assassinations) or 5?

Carl Haber heard a radio newscast while stuck in traffic that said that the Library of Congress had many historic items that were in a fragile state, and that many of the popular songs and famous speeches of the early 1900's couldnt be played due to damage and decay. Enter Carl Haber and Vitaliy Fadeyev, two particle physisits from Lawrence Berkeley's National Laboratory who developed sensors to map the tracks made by subatomic particles unleashed in physics experiments and wondered if their methods could be used to map microscopic contours of old sound recordings (Dictbelt #10 is the medium on which the shots were recorded from a police radio channel between 12:05 and 12:40pm on 11/22/63; purely by accident, the radio microphone of a motorcade motorcycle cop was stuck in the "on" position, and recorded the shots).

For the record, Haber and Vitaliy arent as interested in solving the mystery as they are in developing technology that would preserve historic sound recordings. They convert analog info into a digital format, thus creating a virtual copy of the original without playing it! They started with old 78 records from a used record store and scanned the record's grooves with a digital microscope known as a SmartScope. Fadeyev then wrote a software program to simulate the action of the needle traveling thru virtual grooves. After this, the two men ran the virtual recording thru the program they created and voila! MUSIC!

Archivists at the Library of Congress loaned Haber and Fadeyev a batch of early sound recordings and the two scientists used a device called a confocal microscope to capture the data. The confocal microscope works differently from a SmartScope in that it doesnt scan an entire area, but rather focuses a beam of light on a very small area, capturing the reflection in a photo detector that feeds the measurements into a computer which then assembles a composite from thousands of tiny points. Haber and Fadeyev scanned an "Edison cylinder" of a 1909 song "Just before the Battle, Mother", and the resulting copy eliminated much of the original's crackling/popping/hissing!

The mystery of JFK's murder is made even murkier by the question of just HOW MANY gunmen there were-1 or 2? The Warren Commission determined Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) hired James Barger, a prominent audio scientist to assess the recordings. HE heard 4 shots.
Early in 2001, Donald Thomas, a government scientist interested in the Kennedy shooting, published an article in a British forensics journal, that used a mathematical review of the acoustic evidence and concluded there were 5 shots in two different directions!. The hope is that a digital map of the Dictabelt can solve the mystery...

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I dont know about all of you, but to me, the act of preserving forever these national treasures (and solving the mystery of JFK's murder) is an exciting prospect, and I cant wait to hear what they found out!