« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
May 23, 2006
Did the Big Bang Make a Sound?
“The Apollo astronauts themselves did not intentionally swallow any Moon dust, though it clung to them, covered their white boots and space suits with grime, and so climbed with them back into their lunar modules. The moment they removed their bubble helmets, a smell of spent gunpowder, or of wet ashes in a fireplace assailed them. It was the Moon dust, tamely burning in the oxygen atmosphere the men had carried from home. Outside on the airless lunar surface, did the trodden dust give off any odor of its own? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if no one hears?” Dava Sobel, The Planets, pg 101
The answer to the question “if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound” is easily determined by asking whether you believe sound is an essential part of the reality of nature. If you simply ask: “do trees fall in forests?” the answer is always, yes of course--even though hardly anybody ever sees one fall. But we reasonably think nature happens without us looking. Indeed, it seems laughable to ask: “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to see it, was it visible?” Well then, nature also happens without us hearing it. Next time you are in a forest, all you have to do to determine if a falling tree made a sound is to look for evidence of such an event--which is bound to be plentiful (tracks of animals that ran from that sound, etc.). The same sound waves that reach your ears, obviously exist in nature, without your ears. Simple enough--to solve that poorly presented philosophy question. But:this leads to a more profound inquiry, which the author of “The Planets”, Dava Sobel, approaches, and then shies away from, in the quote above about whether “moondust . . . gives off an odor of its own.”
This is to ask, why have we developed a science which uses only sight as a privileged sense, and relegates the other senses to having no history, while still assuring us of their reality as sensory experience. We have a whole scientific history of the universe, fed to us as not entirely theoretical, based on the observation of light and the derived physics of light. But we have no history of the universe of sound, or smell, or what would really be impossible: taste. But surely if a tree falls in a forest, there are records in the forest of sounds, and then also smells; for nature is (blindly) working without us, the wind is howling, birds are flapping, bees are carrying honey, the smells reach us before we get to the site . . . etc. How about taste? Why is that sense offered on the same level in a biology textbook as the others, and yet ignored in creation? Why do we require the universe to behave according to the laws of physics, in its creation, so it can’t even get started without some explosion in the heavens, requiring billions of years just so these events can happen--according to the laws of physics? And yet not think that the Big Bang actually went . . . Bang! And left a smell like of gunpowder . . . which tastes like ashes. As Dava Sobel shows, this is not entirely poetic, as far away as the Moon. Is it foolish to ask, did the Big Bang make a sound? Well, if it did, it must shatter all those glasses houses, where the physicists live. Or maybe the music of the spheres, travelling slower, as sound does, than light--is on it’s way
“Child of the hour, are we deprived of secret
Knowledge . . . and the guarantee of God?
Is it true there never was a war above, no
Contest for the earth we love? Are we not
Sanctioned to believe that loyalties beyond
Our own have invested time
in water, trees, and stone?
Or hath struck the universe with such force
That echoes in the ear still dumbly sound?”
from The War in Heaven, Edward Williams
Mp3 of live recording of this poem and others at: Stage Poetry Co.
SPILLED GREEN PAINT A scene from the ongoing creation right here on earth (Henrietta, NY): spilled green paint, plus red plastic shopping cart!, between parking spaces at Staples. When I look at this I want to scream: heavens, what has happened here?
Posted by mortimer at 06:22 PM | Comments (4373)