Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Hummmmm

If a tree falls in the woods and noone is around to hear it does it make a noise?

cannontreefell

What do you think?

4 comments:

Bill said...

I grew up on Lake Smith (actually, beside Lake Smith; not on it or in it). The best place, though, was the little creek that fed into it. It was a place only us kids went to because it was woody and muddy, and there were vines to swing on, and crawdads and snakes. I spent many happy hours around that creek.

Hey, Trail Boss, what do you call an Amish man with his hand up a horse's ass?
A mechanic.

Scott W said...

Oh, Bill!

Was the tree humming before it fell? There may be noise, but if no ears are around to accept the sound waves was the sound still audible?

Trailboss said...

That was what I thought So.

Syd said...

Chances are that there were insects around who felt the vibration. Maybe a squirrel or two. Also from the physics standpoint, sound is "a disturbance of mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a wave. Sound is characterized by the properties of sound waves which are frequency, wavelength, period, amplitude and velocity or speed." The perception of sound is not necessary for the sound to exist. As a tree falling in the woods (unless the trees are in a vacuum) will cause compression waves to propagate outward away from the disturbance. Those compression waves are sound regardless of the availability of a "sensor" capable of detecting those waves.
Whew!