eli5: why does static on tv look and sound the way it does?
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Static is white noise, which is present as natural radio waves in the atmosphere and thermal noise inside the electronic circuits of the TV. When there is no signal, the TV tries to amplify and display and play back this noise. White noise is entirely random in character, so it sounds like hissing and looks like random dots. A color TV will show white dots, because color information is encoded by special patterns which are missing from the noise. A blank video tape also contains white noise in the form of magnetic particles oriented in random directions.
Modern digital TV doesn’t show white noise, because it turns off the digital decoder in the absence of comprehensible digital data.
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