Atheists or well-educated Christians, can you help me with this one?

10-29-2009, 03:13 PM

I posted it in physics but there were no answerers there, just tons of homework questions.

Do you think we'd be able to detect or study sound waves if we did not have the ability to hear them first?

Or would they simply go unnoticed?

10-29-2009, 03:13 PM

Absosmurfly...

Go stand in front of a large speaker and jack the volume way up. The sound waves, if loud enough, can actually arrest your heart. The US Military has experimented with sound-based weapons that have nothing to do with your hearing because of this.

It is reported that Beethoven actually sawed the legs off his piano so that he could hear the notes he was playing through the vibrations in the floor. It was how he wrote his music. Absosmurfly, Totally Deaf.

At some point, even if we had all been deaf, we would have made the discovery, just like so many other things we can't detect. X-rays, for example, UV Light, IR Light, atomic structure, etc.

Hope this helps...

**Pedestal 42** · 10-29-2009, 03:13 PM

Yes, we'd detect them.

But we wouldn't treat a certain range of compression waves or vibrations as special, "sound", just as we do with the electro-magnetic spectrum. (calling one bit of it "light" and "colour". Or "color" if you are from a different place.)

**daniil the cavejew** · 10-29-2009, 03:13 PM

yes, and we can detect sound waves that human ears can pick up with certain tools.

**Heeby Jeebus** · 10-29-2009, 03:14 PM

As long as there's a medium through which the sound waves can travel, such as air or water, they could be detected.

**WellTraveledProg** · 10-29-2009, 03:14 PM

We would have noticed them by the vibrations they produce, which even deaf people can hear. In fact, right now there's a big truck going down my street, and though I can't hear it, it's rattling my house through vibration. Surely somebody would have noticed that and wanted to find out what was going on...

We can't see infrared light or radio waves, but we still detected, studied, and use them. We can't see far into the ultraviolet, but we still detected UV light and use and study it. That's one big thing science has done for us: allowed us to expand what we can "sense" way beyond our simple physical senses. Ain't it great?

Peace.

**Arimesis** · 10-29-2009, 03:14 PM

We do not necessarily have to hear soundwaves, we simply have to be able to detect them. We know that radio waves, UHF, VHF and LF all exist, yet we cannot physically hear them. Their proof, and thus their control, comes with scientific discovery and manipulation.