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Title:
“Music and the Making of Modern Science.”
Speaker:
Abstract:
In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception. For the next two millennia, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science; not just a charming accompaniment to thought, music is a conceptual force in its own right. This lecture explores a series of episodes in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science: new directions in Renaissance music leading to the modern concept of number; Johannes Kepler’s search for cosmic laws through musical proportions; Max Planck’s musical experiments and the origins of the quantum theory. 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.
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