How else would a physics and astronomy professor celebrate a monumental university anniversary than with science?

Brian Anderson, a full-time BYU professor since 2015, found a unique way to mark BYU’s 150th birthday: by blowing out candles on the university’s birthday cake using focused sound.

Anderson has spent years studying time reversal acoustics, a sound-focusing technique that has surprising applications. In recent research efforts, he and his students have used BYU’s reverberation rooms to create extremely loud, focused sounds, essentially simulating explosions, to study how sound travels at high levels.

For BYU’s birthday celebration, Anderson worked with Jay Cliftmann, a 2024 BYU graduate now pursuing a Ph.D. at Penn State. Together, they explored how to “blow out targeted cand

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