New edgy thread

EDIT
*Get out of here !? :)

I haven't looked it up (out of laziness) but surely the idea that sound propagates though a medium is well established as a theory and not still languishing as a hypothesis !! Surely !*

I thought I hadn't gone completely mad, the notion of sound propogating through a medium is covered by the wave theory of sound - which is of course a theory not a hypothesis.

We're talking at cross purposes. You're talking about the scientific theory of sound; I'm talking about the philosophical leap from the subjective, heard sound, to its supposed origins in physical perturbations, which I maintain is a hypothesis, although it's not a particularly scientific or testable hypothesis, granted. It is, though, the hypothesis that Berkeley is grappling with.

Berkeley's answer to the question of whether the tree makes the sound if no one hears is it is that it does make a sound because God hears it and God is always around to hear everything - but then he was a clergyman, a bishop at that. This might be a good time for me to say that I am in no way defending Berkeley's position, just making a case for the validity of his concerns about how we come to know about the physical world.

This isn't just an ancient worry that physicists have moved on from entirely. There's a lot of this kind of agonising about reality and observation in Eddington, the bloke who demonstrated that Einstein's theory of relativity held water.