The first time I came across a connection between physics and music was when reading Cosmos, by Carl Sagan. It’s a book on the history of our universe, with many insights on how science developed and how it influenced our civilization.
The chapter that stayed with me the most was ‘The Harmony of the World’, particularly the part on Johannes Kepler.
‘Within the ‘ symphony of voices’, Kepler believed that the speed of each planet corresponds to certain notes in the Latinate musical scale popular in his day -do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He claimed that in the harmony of the spheres, the tones of Earth are fa and mi, that the Earth is forever humming fa and mi, and that they stand in a straightforward way for the Latin word for famine. He argued, not unsuccessfully, that the Earth was best described by that single doleful word.’ (Sagan, 1995)
He describes this idea in his book Harmonices Mundi (The Harmonies of the World) in 1619, along with the third law of planetary movement.
Kepler understood many things by the word harmony: the order and beauty of planetary motion, the existence of mathematical laws explaining that motion and even harmony in the musical sense, the ‘harmony of the spheres.
The idea of a music of the spheres has existed since Medieval times. The concept is widely attributed to Pythagoras (Khan, 1999) and is built on the idea that the cosmos assumed harmonious proportions, tonalities, and ultimately periodic frequencies. This theory went on to develop into the Western diatonic system we are so used to today.
I was aware of Kepler as an astronomer, his three laws on planetary motion are the first thing a student learns when introduced to astrophysics. What I was completely unaware of were the beliefs and processes that brought him to these laws, his interest in philosophy, astrology, music and overall God. Probably naive of me to not expect it in a time when the Church was the main governing body. As a young man he was studying to join the clergy which he eventually gave up on and instead started searching for God in nature. The reason I’m mentioning this is because I think it relates to the discussion on interdisciplinarity. There is a strong focus on output and productivity nowadays with very little space for exploration and mistakes. Kepler had to change his beliefs several times from the core and make many bold statements that he lived to prove wrong before he made his big discovery. His musical or philosophical theories might not have stood for very long, but they were nevertheless part of his research process and had a part in the end result. In today’s society divided in so many deeply specialized fields, each with their own epistemologies and taxonomies, this ability to see the bigger picture has become lost.
References
Sagan, C. (1995). Cosmos. Abacus.
Khan, D. (1999). Noise, Water, Meat. A History of Sound in the Arts. The MIT Press Cambridge.