22/02/2024
«The story goes that, late in his life, Guglielmo Marconi had an epiphany.
The godfather of radio technology decided that no sound ever dies. It just decays beyond the point that we can detect it with our ears. Any sound was forever recoverable, he believed, with the right device. His dream was to build one powerful enough to pick up Christ's Sermon on the Mount.
On the most basic level, Marconi was wrong. Sound is just change in air pressure that we interpret as information. The air is disturbed, but it always rights itself. The air always wins. But to say that a sound dies implies that it was once alive, and that's not quite right, either. Sound waves are energy, and in our universe energy is never created or destroyed—it just changes form. The energy of a sound wave is absorbed by the air molecules until we can't hear it anymore, but nothing has really died. And if death never occurred, doesn't it stand to reason that the sound lives on somehow?»
