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If a Big Bang occurs in a space/ nothingness and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Its either wordplay, philosophy, or science... the choice is yours.

If it doesn't, it can't be 'bang' of any size, can it?

If it does, then why do people care about the 'tree in the forest', as this is a much more clear example.

5 Answers

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  • 1 decade ago
    Favorite Answer

    LOL Good question.

    1) Scientific prospective: Sound is the movement of air through space. So no sound would have been made during the start of the Big Bang according to that theory. Hearing is the human perception of sound through the ear, so if a tree falls in a forest it will make a sound and can be easily proven with physics.

    2) Play on words: The Big Bang was proposed by Catholic Priest named Georges Lemaître in 1927 in his paper called "A homogeneous Universe of constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae" which was first rejected outright by Albert Einstein. It was not until 1931 when Edwin Hubble discovered the Redshift that Einstein finally agreed with Lemaître. When that happened Georges Lemaître officially called his theory "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation" but it was Fred Hoyle who coined the name "Big Bang Theory"

    3) My own philosophical prospective: The Big Bang Theory is just Religion disguised as Science. Did you ever wonder why we can see 13.7 Billion Light Years in every direction? Would that not put us in the middle of everything? How did that happen? The truth of the matter is that the universe is infinite both in time and size.

  • I AM
    Lv 4
    1 decade ago

    No, for sounds only exist where ears exist. Ears only exist in an environment that allows them to exist. How would anyone know what a sound was unless they first heard one? Now it seems obvious that sound was there before ears because we denote sound as the vibration of molecules, so if there was an atmosphere around a planet there must be sounds. Yet I ask you can the deaf hear? If they can not can the universe, without yet formed functioning ears, hear the vibrations? I would say that though there is the potential for sound (air molecules jostling about alongside the processes of evolution) its not until that critical step (evolution of the sense of sound in organisms) that sound actually exists or can be heard.

  • 1 decade ago

    Actually it does. It sort of sounds like a big vibration that slowely ends at the finite level by vibrating the being percieving the sound. It is a well known sound repeated daily by millions. And if you cant hear it I bet you wish you could.

  • 1 decade ago

    Humans don't need to be near it in order to hear a sound. The notion that a sound is a sound because humans hear it is false logic.

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  • ?
    Lv 6
    1 decade ago

    Sure it makes noise. Just because we aren't there to hear it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

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