SILENCE
When a silence falls
in the forest
and no one is around to hear,
is a tree compelled
to sacrifice itself
into the void?
Musings
"The Sound of Silence" is one of my favorite songs. But real silence? There's no such thing.
Even in the absence of sound waves, even in deep space where no one can hear you scream, the cosmic microwave background has been crashing across the universe for 13.8 billion years and counting.
This is the "sound" left over from the Big Bang, as recreated by University of Washington physicist John Cramer by transforming the data of temperature fluctuations:
In addition to all that noise ringing constantly in the background of eternity, we've recently (since 2016) become able to detect gravity waves. We can "hear" distant collisions of black holes spinning around each other, faster and closer, until bam! They merge into an even larger black hole. The signal noise is described as a "chirp" against a constant background of noise.
Specific to the forest, and other places across the surface of the Earth, the ground is always trembling with seismic noise from earthquakes, rivers and tides, wind, cars and trucks, construction, and the occasional tree falling over.
Noise is the absence of signal, but the absence of noise can only be experienced by deliberately tuning out the world.
More Tomorrow.
❤️❤️ this post has two of the things i love the most : poetry, and physics. And not just any poem - a reference to simon and garfunkel, which in my youth was one of my absolute favorite bands (along with, perhaps strangely, metallica). i think my favorite song of all time was their version of "scarborough fair" (a traditional english ballad) which in my naive youth i thought was entitled "parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme." i first heard it somewhere between the ages of 6 and 10, in the middle of the night - i used to sleep with the radio on, and at some point i awoke and the song was playing, and i imagined armored knights riding on their horses through a misty forest, and i absolutely loved it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BakWVXHSug
My parents had The Graduate soundtrack on vinyl which had “Scarborough Fair” and “Sound of Silence” that I’d listen to over and over. Except that I heard it as, “Are you going to Scarborough Fair, partially-sane Rosemary Antime?”
hah! that's great. i was constantly misinterpreting lyrics. back then of course we didn't have youtube and the consequent ability to listen to music while looking at the lyrics - instead we had to actually have access to the inside jacket of a record and follow along, reading the tiny script. if i just heard songs on the radio, which was of course 99 % of what i had access to, all kinds of wild interpretations of what was said ruled supreme, and i just ran with it.