Or that the document Olivia is holding in her hand when the director’s room reverts back to the correct universe is the photograph of the TWO victims in his universe, rather than the ONE in hers. Which means they now have evidence of there being two universes…

I guess that’s what happens when you’re looking too closely at the trees…

It’s much easier for me to fantasize that the vibrations would have caused the glass to vibrate from one end to the other and back again, instead of *every* surface of the glass vibrating at the exact same time. And somehow, they were able to decipher the frequency by measuring the distance between the “waves” (or whatever it’s called) on the glass.

And regarding the electron microscope… I’m not really a chemistry/biology, but I’d like to fantasize (once again)… take a whole bunch of high-res images from different angles and positions, and combine them together using a simple pattern recognition algorithm (or just record the whole thing as a video and use optical flow to match the movement in order to map each frame together). That would probably allow them to reduce (if not get rid of) the calibration/preparing samples process.

But all in all, I’m glad that I’m dumb enough to not nitpick what’s wrong with the episode… which is why I enjoyed it immensely. Feel kinda bad for you guys. :)

The sound recovery system was utter nonsense from beginning to end – it didn’t even give a nod to sequential recording, like the pottery-sound-recovery myth. It definitely justifies advancing the clock.

I would just like to point out that this sentence made my brain hurt…

Before addressing my main complain, I’ll just ask why this spiffy invention would be the least bit useful if Walter’s records suffered from water damage? (How does being exposed to water affect the ability to play the LP’s? The jackets may be destroyed, but the vinyl should be intact. Was it special Fringe water that melts vinyl?)

In addition to your points, I’ll add a fundamental flaw to the whole thing.

Even if we grant that

-It is possible to “naturally” encode sound waves on a microscopic level on a pane of heated glass.
-This special invention doesn’t require special preparation of the samples.
-The background noise could be filtered out.
-The window captured the exact sound with extreme fidelity.

We have the problem of the fact that their recording medium was STATIC, and all the sounds were encoded in the exact same location.
When you capture sound on a record, the stylus is moving across the surface of the record in real time as the record spins and the stylus tracks inwards, such that the captured sound wave is a long continuous stream spiraling inward on the disc, and the data never overlaps. The window pane was static in place. Recording sound onto the window in this manner would be like cutting a record with the stylus held fixed in place without the record spinning, or recording onto magnetic tape with out moving the tape across the recording head. All the information would be encoded in the same spot, and would be absolutely indecipherable and unrecoverable.