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THE SOUND OF SILENCE
If you own an MP4 or a CD player, try the following experiment: Turn up the volume until it
won't go any further. (Before you do this, take out the disk - this experiment will not work
if you have perforated eardrums.) Nothing is playing on your CD now, right? So what you
are hearing is - nothing. Right? i doubt you'll hear nothing. You'll hear noise. A lot of noise.
Noise, however, is a subjective term. One man's music is another man's jumbo jet. You could
also say that you are listening to electrons singing. Every transistor, every resistor, every IC has
its own "song." When you apply a current to it, it sings.
There was a famous film in the sixties in which a photographer unwittingly photographs a murder. While analyzing proofs of a park scene, he sees something under a tree that he can't quite make out. he goes back to the darkroom and proceeds to make larger and larger enlargements of this little piece of film. In the end, his trained eye detects a human body under the tree, but to the audience in the cinema the picture looks like a pointillist abstraction filled with dots. Film is made up of silver crystals. If you blow up a negative enough, the image will yield to the background fabric of the film itself: the "noise" of the photograph. Or is it its "song"? When Bell Labs built a giant antenna in holmdel, New Jersey, in 1960, it was part of a very early satellite transmission system called Echo. however, two employees of Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, had their eye on the holmdel antenna for quite a different purpose. They realized that it would make a superb radio telescope. At first, they were disappointed. When they started their research, they couldn't get rid of a background "noise." it was like trying to tune into your favorite radio program and it being obscured with static. This annoyance was a uniform signal in the microwave range that seemed to come from all directions. Everyone assumed it came from the telescope itself. They checked out everything, trying to find the source of this excess radiation. They even pointed the antenna right at New York City - there's no bigger urban radio "noise" than the Big Apple. It wasn't urban interference. It wasn't radiation from our galaxy or extraterrestrial radio sources. It wasn't even the pigeons - Penzias and Wilson had kicked them out of the big horn-shaped antenna and swept out all their droppings. The source remained constant throughout the four seasons, so it couldn't have come from the solar system. Nor could it be the product of a 1962 aboveground nuclear test, because within a year that fallout would have shown a decrease. They had to conclude it was not the machine and it was not random noise causing the radiation. What was it then that they were hearing? Eventually they came to the staggering conclusion that what they were hearing was the very first moments of the creation of the universe. The discovery in 1963 of the cosmic microwave background of the big bang was compelling evidence that the universe was born at a definite moment. In the 1950s, there were two theories about the origin of the universe. The first was called the steady state theory. It had been put forward by hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred hoyle and held that the universe was homogeneous in space and time and had remained like that forever - in a "steady state." This was essentially what the Greeks had posited - that the universe was kadmon, that it had always existed. The rival and, at the time, more controversial theory sought to incorporate the expansion of the universe into its framework. Edwin hubble had shown in 1929 that galaxies are moving away from one another at remarkable speeds, implying that the space between galaxies is constantly expanding. A few physicists led by George Gamow had taken this idea further and argued that the separation between galaxies must have been smaller in the past. If one extrapolated this idea to its logical conclusion, it meant that, at one point in time, the universe had been infinitely dense. Gamow and his colleagues were able to show that the point - which was also infinitely hot - corresponded to the moment of Creation. Everything in the universe had emerged from this incredibly dense and hot state in a cataclysmic event astronomers call "the big bang." The conflict between the theories was resolved by Penzias and Wilson in 1965 when they discovered that the mysterious radio signal was cosmic radiation that had survived from the first moments of the universe. It was proof of the big bang. "This is the day of the beginning of Your works, a remembrance of the first day" (Rosh haShana prayers). "Says Rabbi Eliezer: The world was created in Tishrei" (Rosh HaShana 10b). A CD player playing nothing - electrons singing. A giant blowup of a photograph - the song of silver crystals. And the most distant and cold whisper of the song of the world's creation. If you open up certain prayer books, at the beginning you'll find Perek Shira, literally, "Chapter of Song." in a few pages, Perek Shira lists the quintessential aspects of animal, vegetable, and astronomical life in the world. Some say this esoteric and mysterious text was authored by King David; others attribute it to one of the Sages of the Tannaic era. But one thing is clear: the elements of terrestrial and extraterrestrial life in Perek Shira are referred to as being elements of song. There is no silence at the center of things. Descend beneath the superficial descriptive level of any medium, be it in sight or sound, or listen to the center of the universe itself, and you won't find silence - you'll find song. That song is the sound of every rock and bird, of every electron and star doing the bidding of its Creator. THE ART OF SILENCE
there is no silence in the heartof silence no waves that sail no clouds dissolving no idea as wide as the sky is blue just the faithful constancy of Is. More articles available at Ohr Somayach's website. |