Music and the Making of Modern Science

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory.

In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science—that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. 
 
Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music—its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line. Introduction 1
1 Music and the Origins of Ancient Science 9
2 The Dream of Oresme 21
3 Moving the Immovable 35
4 Hearing the Irrational 55
5 Kepler and the Song of the Earth 73
6 Descartes's Musical Apprenticeship 89
7 Mersenne's Universal Harmony 103
8 Newton and the Mystery of the Major Sixth 121
9 Euler: The Mathematics of Musical Sadness 133
10 Euler: From Sound to Light 151
11 Young's Musical Optics 161
12 Electric Sounds 181
13 Hearing the Field 195
14 Helmholtz and the Sirens 217
15 Riemann and the Sound of Space 231
16 Turning the Atoms 245
17 Planck's Cosmic Harmonium 255
18 Unheard Harmonies 271
Notes 285
References 311
Sources and Illustration Credits 335
Acknowledgments 337
Index 339Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Sky in a Bottle; and Music and the Making of Modern Science, all published by the MIT Press.