Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

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> Variation of the same question: Were there radio waves before there radios?

I'm not sure that is analogous. The chicken/egg question is about at what point we started identifying an egg as being a chicken egg as opposed to being an egg from another animal. In other words, did the first chicken egg come from a chicken (meaning the chicken came first), or from a proto-chicken (meaning the egg came first)?

A closer variation might be: Which came first, the radio broadcast or the radio broadcaster? Before the radio broadcast and radio broadcaster there was radio and people using radio, but they did not reach a wide public audience. At some point the early small-scale experimental radio use turned into broad utilization, but when and which was earlier on the timeline?

I'd have to go with radio broadcaster. You can make radio waves by touching the poles of a battery together with a wire. BUT, if you don't know you are making radio waves are you still a broadcaster?

> You can make radio waves by touching the poles of a battery together with a wire.

You can. But making radio waves does not imply a broadcast. At least not in the traditional sense. I'll grant you that colloquially we have sometimes come to refer to any radio transmission as a broadcast, but that is not the usage here.

> BUT, if you don't know you are making radio waves are you still a broadcaster?

If you didn't know a chicken emerged from an egg, is it still a chicken? My experience with young children who don't yet understand that process would say yes. No doubt there are career radio broadcasters out there who are not familiar with the science of radio.

It's not about not knowing of the existence of something, though. We know the chicken came from an egg. We just don't know what kind of egg it was. Was it a chicken egg or was it a flibberdoodle egg? If it was a chicken egg, how did the flibberdoodle lay a chicken egg? If it was a flibberdoodle egg, how did a chicken come out?

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