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.
