It's a classic question: "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"
On the surface, a lot of people can easily dismiss this. Why wouldn't it make a sound? There is no known force that could prevent it from creating a vibration in the air while unobserved. However, this brings in the impossibility of proving a negative. It is impossible to say what does or does not happen in circumstances that are, by definition, unobserved. That rabbit trail leads into weird quantum stuff, but there's another tack to take on this question, and it's semantics. As a literature guy, I'm thinking we veer into semantics rather than dig deeper into the weirdest of sciences.
So then, semantically speaking, is a "sound" a vibration in the air? You might think that, yes, that is what we know that sound scientifically is; but think about it this way: could sound be defined as the interaction between airwaves and eardrums?
If a vibration never interacts with a set of eardrums, is that vibration sound?
Another old adage goes "In space, no one can hear you scream." If a tree falls in a vacuum, yet is influenced by gravity equal to that of earth, it still strikes with the same force, and creates the same vibrations; but without a sound-conductive medium, those vibrations do not travel through the right medium to reach human ears.
Most would say that a tree falling in THOSE circumstances would not make a sound, even though the force of impact creates the same energy's-worth of vibration as a tree falling on earth. So, in one set of circumstances, the tree falling and not being heard by humans makes a sound; yet in another circumstance, the tree falls, and goes unheard by humans, and does not make a sound.
I would argue, then, that the tree makes no sound; because until a vibration reaches an eardrum, it is not a sound; it is nothing but a vibration.
. . .but, what do you think?
