Terrifying is my low-level knowledge of most pedestrian everyday things. I imagine myself in an Elizabethan time warp sometimes (I would do it to meet Shakespeare). There would be no danger of me inducing an Enlightenment before its time! Imagine I was asked where I was from and to prove something like electricity exists in humanity’s future? “Well, it’s a simple set up really. A switch and some wires and… then there’s light.”

Elizabethan: Dost though speak of witchcraft!?

Me: No, Nooo, no, no no. You see there’s this goblet of glass and a small filament thingy inside…

Oh God. I think I’d be hanged at dawn before I knew it.

What prompted this? I’m trying to sound proof my home studio in the basement, and am getting way out of my depth. Look at this advice from ‘Science Direct’, for example:

Sound Absorption

Sound absorption is the measure of the amount of energy removed from the sound wave as the wave passes through a given thickness of material. While propagating from air into an absorbing material, the sound wave could experience reflection or absorption thereby losing energy, experiencing dampening effects. In a polymeric material sound absorption takes place by transforming sound waves into heat. Materials with their characteristic impedance similar to air are regarded as best soundproofing materials thus foamed plastics are the preferred materials for such applications. Typically, elastomers and amorphous polymers show higher sound absorption properties as compared to semicrystalline or crystalline materials.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/sound-absorption