City
Lights Booksellers & Publishers has just released a new tome that
Hoffer himself would surely enjoy. The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between
Music and The Structure of the Universe by Stephon Alexander is a complex
and obtuse read...but well worth the effort. The effort has met with mixed
literary reviews, but we favor how City
Lights describes it:
More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical
notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed
star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core
of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor,
using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future
of the universe.
Following the great minds that first drew the links between
music and physics—a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and
Rakim—The Jazz of Physics revisits the ancient realm where music,
physics, and the cosmos were one. This cosmological journey accompanies
Alexander’s own tale of struggling to reconcile his passion for music and
physics, from taking music lessons as a boy in the Bronx to studying
theoretical physics at Imperial College, London’s inner sanctum of string
theory. Playing the saxophone and improvising with equations, Alexander
uncovered the connection between the fundamental waves that make up sound and
the fundamental waves that make up everything else. As he reveals, the ancient
poetic idea of the "music of the spheres," taken seriously, clarifies
confounding issues in physics.
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