Saturday 30 September 2023

Ultrasonic tomography

Several proposals emerged for the cheese block. 

A cheese sculpture festival. Creating the skyline of Dam Torsad out of cheese, or just letting the artists do their thing and elect a winning sculpture. With the amount of cheese at hand, these could be enormous sculptures.

Second was a three-dimensional maze. Jenny from the block emphasized how people wonder about holes in the cheese, and how they could be connected to form some sort of maze. It is unclear whether this particular block has holes or inclusions, so we have rented large-scale ultrasonic imaging equipment. 

It sends sound waves through the cheese. If there is a hole, or a high-density inclusion, this will scatter the waves as they go through the block. As we do this from different directions, using tomographic techniques we can reconstruct any structure inside the block. It makes a three-dimensional map of the cheese block's insides.

After a full day of probing with the rented large ultrasonic probe, we can be confident that there are no large scale inclusions in the cheese block. It is  just a giant lump of cheese. This still makes it a candidate for the three-dimensional maze, but the maze would then not include any natural cavities in the cheese.