Thanks for the links. Your comments about the "OLDEST HUMAN VOICE RECORDING OF ALL TIME" reminded me about a thought experiment I once heard.
Imagine a pottery wheel spinning thousands of years ago, and people talking as it spun. Then imagine that for some reason, a stick or other object was leaning against the wheel, and engraving a pattern. Theoretically, the vibrations of the people speaking would be picked up (at some level) by this engraving.
The end result is that if you had a device that was sufficiently sensitive, and you could remove a sufficiently large amount of noise (caused by other sources of vibration), then you could reconstruct an actual recording of people speaking thousands of years ago.
Of course, it is not likely that this will happen in the near future, or even at all. In fact, a quick search will show that it has already been used as an April Fools joke by some scientists [0].
However, that is not to say that it is impossible.
The reason I love this thought experiment is because it goes to show that if you start with the presumption that at some point, our tools become better, then there are very few limits to what can be found out. What would happen if you went back 150 years and told everybody that in 150 years, we would have tools that can track the trajectories of sub-atomic particles as they travel at speeds horrendously close to the speed of light?
Mythbusters did the 'recording in pottery' thing, if you're interested in that kind of programme.
One of the problems I see is that the pottery surface is inherently noisy, and the signal is very low. That would make recovering anything terribly remote. This isn't about needing better resolution to recover the signal, it's about the signal not being there because it's been obliterated by noise.
Yup, it sure is noisy. But let me indulge in my (not so realistic, but still potentially feasible) thought experiment :)
What if it turns out there is actually a predictable pattern to the noise on a ceramic surface. Perhaps there is a way that the molecules fit together that mean there is a few rules that govern the noise, such that we can then indeed remove it from any "recordings".
Or maybe there's some mathematical properties of noise that are yet to be understood which allow us to remove it correctly.
Or perhaps there is some arm of science which doesn't even exist yet (in the same way quantum computing didn't exist so long ago).
As much as I love the idea of this happening, if we are talking about such tiny variations, it's just as likely that erosion (air, water, pottery mud) would've wiped these tiny variations out.
Imagine a pottery wheel spinning thousands of years ago, and people talking as it spun. Then imagine that for some reason, a stick or other object was leaning against the wheel, and engraving a pattern. Theoretically, the vibrations of the people speaking would be picked up (at some level) by this engraving.
The end result is that if you had a device that was sufficiently sensitive, and you could remove a sufficiently large amount of noise (caused by other sources of vibration), then you could reconstruct an actual recording of people speaking thousands of years ago.
Of course, it is not likely that this will happen in the near future, or even at all. In fact, a quick search will show that it has already been used as an April Fools joke by some scientists [0].
However, that is not to say that it is impossible.
The reason I love this thought experiment is because it goes to show that if you start with the presumption that at some point, our tools become better, then there are very few limits to what can be found out. What would happen if you went back 150 years and told everybody that in 150 years, we would have tools that can track the trajectories of sub-atomic particles as they travel at speeds horrendously close to the speed of light?
[0] - http://www.ohgizmo.com/2006/02/20/5000-year-old-recordings-c...