Schrodinger's Tree
If a tree falls in the forest, and no ones around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is obviously yes, right? A sound is a sound, whether someone hears it or not. However I don't believe this was really what the asker of that question was trying to get at. With a small modification, this seemingly obvious and maybe a little dumb question can become profoundly more interesting. Let's worry less about humans, for now, and pose that question again. This time we'll ask, "if a tree falls in a forest and no living thing is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" No ears or antenna of any kind belonging to human, animal, bird, insect, alien, etc. Now there's a little more to think about. What is sound, exactly? A phenomenon that occurs when vibrations in the air are detected by a sense organ, which converts the vibrations to electrical impulses, which are then interpreted by the brain into a sensual experience - AKA a sound. This definition requires the use of a sense organ (ears, antenna, etc.) and a brain. And so in this new scenario, it seems that the falling tree absolutely creates vibrations in the air, but without a living being around to detect and convert those vibrations into the experience of sound, then there is no sound as a result. This in itself is food for thought, however just for fun, we can push this scenario a little further. In Quantum Physics, there is a phenomenon known as the Observer Effect, whereby the observation of a system changes the state of that system. This occurs due to the observation itself being an interaction with the system that it's observing. So with that in mind, let's say that we left a camera recording the fall of the tree, but so far we have allowed no one - including ourselves - to watch it. Did the tree still make a sound? Surely we'd need to watch the footage first, to confirm or deny the fact. Remember that a tree falling with no living thing nearby to translate its shockwave into sound was concluded to be silent. So is the falling tree event a silent one, right up until the moment someone watches the footage, at which point history is re-written? Does the tree that fell silently now cease to exist, replaced with the tree that fell with a sound, after the footage is reviewed? Perhaps the tree sits precariously in both states simultaneously, neither silent nor with sound, until we choose to observe (or not) the action of its fall, thereby forcing it to become either one (a tree with sound) or the other (a silent tree).
- Aluca Sol
