The Jazz of Physics
The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A spectacular musical and scientific journey from the Bronx to the cosmic horizon that reveals the astonishing links between jazz, science, Einstein, and Coltrane
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 put physics and geometry at the core of his music.
Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, 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 reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the "Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.
The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Using his own life as the baseline, Alexander, a professor of physics at Brown University, sweetly riffs on deep connections between music and cosmology. Alexander begins with his childhood and youth, during which he discovered his own passions for both physics and jazz. His life story is filled with physics mentors with serious jazz chops as well as encounters with "physics-enthusiast musicians" such as Yusef Lateef, Ornette Coleman, and Brian Eno. Alexander likens theoretical physics to jazz improvisation and discusses the ways that being a jazz musician has benefited his own theories. Those without a background in musicology and cosmology may have difficulty following some of Alexander's lines of thought, but most of his conclusions are readily grasped. In a key example, he lays out how the structure of the universe arises from a "pattern of vibration," much like a musical composition. Alexander, the son of a New York cab driver from Trinidad, concludes by sharing his dream that the work of physics, like jazz improvisation, will be enriched by practitioners from many backgrounds. Alexander's account of his own rise from humble beginnings to produce contributions to both cosmology and jazz is as interesting as the marvelous connections he posits between jazz and physics.
Customer Reviews
No music in this prose...
As an academic who has ploughed an almost solitary path in using interdisciplinary analogical heuristics — many from the domains of science and music — to generate new models in the famously conservative field of legal theory, I approached this book with expectation. I hoped that I had stumbled upon a like minded theorist (and musician) in Alexander. The argument at the books core, that analogical thinking offers epistemic access in theoretical physics, is worth declaiming loudly. But the book is a failed project in improvisational prose. The message is repeatedly lost in random passages of peer group fandom, autobiography, theoretical physics for dummies, such passages in turn often spoiled by including formulaic math beyond general readership comprehension. The book has no structure, no symmetry, no beauty and is written in an ADHD prose narrative. Did anyone proof the manuscript? The musical analysis is repetitive and also promises explanation only to obfuscate the message with poorly explained illustrations from music theory. This is an opportunity wasted to present universally applicable insights in theoretical methodology to an audience beyond the in-group of theoretical physicists, who, presumably already know this.