Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Zippy, with birds and software:

A pun on tweet, bird song vs. Twitter message, with an old philosophical conundrum as the vehicle.

According to the Wikipedia entry, the topic goes back at least to Berkeley:

Philosopher George Berkeley, in his work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), proposes, “But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park […] and nobody by to perceive them. […] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden […] no longer than while there is somebody by to perceive them.”

Later versions, which might or might not be traceable to Berkeley, frame things as a question:

In June 1883 in the magazine The Chautauquan, the question was put, “If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?”

… The current phrasing appears to have originated in the 1910 book Physics by Charles Riborg Mann and George Ransom Twiss. The question “When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?” is posed along with many other questions to quiz readers on the contents of the chapter, and as such, is posed from a purely physical point of view.

For Zippy, it’s all about Googling things.

This entry was posted on October 15, 2012 at 4:43 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Puns, These modern times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.