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Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

Last posted Apr 06, 2010 at 05:16PM EDT. Added Nov 27, 2009 at 02:02AM EST
1052 posts from 106 users

A: Yes. He decided to leave. Whenever I asked why he hasn't done anything, he says "I don't feel like it." Maybe it's a good thing, he acts like he's 11. (He's 17)
Q: Are we Human or are we Dancer?

A: never
Q: Why won't you guys let this thread die??
also

Hector: “Dang, they look just like those girls down the street.” Leaves to go… you know.

so close

George Berkeley was an Irish philosopher who created and promoted a theory he called "immaterialism" later referred to as "subjective idealism". His dictum was "Esse est percipi" – "To be is to be perceived". He talked of objects ceasing to exist once there was nobody around to perceive them. In his work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, he proposes, "But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park and nobody by to perceive them. The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them." One source[who?] cites him concisely phrasing the question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really fall?" His philosophical musings had nothing to do with sound at all, neither its physical nature nor its metaphysical possibilities.

Some years later, a similar question is posed. It is unknown whether the source of this question is Berkeley or not. In June 1883 in the magazine The Chautauquan in Volume 3, Issue 9 on page 543 the question was put, "If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?" They then went on to answer the query with, "No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion." This seems to imply that the question is posed not from a philosophical viewpoint, but from a purely scientific one. The magazine Scientific American corroborated the technical aspect of this question, while leaving out the philosophic side, a year later on Apr 5, 1884, on page 218 of their magazine when they asked the question slightly reworded, "If a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?" And gave a more technical answer, "Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound."

The current phrasing appears to have originated in the 1910 book Physics by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss. The question "When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?" is posed along with many other questions to quiz readers on the contents of the chapter, and as such, is posed from a purely physical point of view.

In recent years, however, the quandary has gone back to its possible metaphysical roots, albeit with wording that muddies the philosophical riddle that Berkeley supposed it to be.

The common sense answer, as the question has mostly come to rely on, is that yes, it obviously makes a sound since we know that a tree falling makes noise regardless of whether anyone is around or not. The metaphysical, and perhaps first roughly proposed, answer is that no, the tree does not make a sound if no one is there to witness it falling. And indeed the act of making a sound isn't even a quandary, all that matters is that the tree in fact ceases to exist if no one is there to witness it.

The production of sound requires 3 things: A source, a medium, and a receiver. The source, through vibrations called "compression" and "rarefraction", creates a series of pressure waves that vary in frequency and amplitude. These pressure waves propagate through various mediums including water, air and solids. The receiver collects and converts these pressure waves into electrical impulses. If you remove any of the 3 requirements for sound, there is no sound.

In the vacuum of outer space there is no means of propagation, therefore, no sound. In the absence of a receiver in the woods, the falling tree only produces a series of pressure waves.

If a tree fell in the forest, it would disturb the surrounding air, creating vibrations that the auditory senses are capable of sensing. For the absence of these sound waves, there would have to be an absence of air, in which case the tree would not exist in the first place. It is not the absence of sound that should be considered, but rather the absence of awareness of the sound.

A: ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! KLUGSKASIULASJKFHKLJASLDFJHASFYIOAWHIJHAWIJFHIOJHWIOPJAHOWIUH@#&()Q(U@UIRPHFASOFASDASFASDFASD
@: why god why?

Skeletor-sm

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