Scientists need hobbies. The harsh work of navigating complex theories and academia politics can reach people. Stephen Alexander, a professor at Brown University and astrophysicist. Alexander plays the saxophone, but at this point it may not be accurate to call his recession a leisure pursuit, as John Coltrane is as important as Einstein, Kepler and Newton.
In the seven-minute TED talk above, Coltrane says, “it changed the direction of my research…it basically led to discovering physics.” Alexander then plays the opening bar for “Familiar.”A huge step. “He’s not Coltrane, but he is a very creative thinker and his love for jazz gave him a unique perspective on theoretical physics.
Alexander describes the jazz epiphany caused by the complex diagrams that Coltrane was conveyed to the legendary jazz musician and Professor Yousef Leiteff of the University of Massachusetts in 1967. a Business Insider Essay on his discoveries“What I noticed was that Coltrane’s illustrations reflect the same geometric principles that motivated Einstein’s theory.”
The theory “may sound like an essential pop philosophy right away,” I’m writing The Creators ProjectWe will introduce a musical collaboration with Rioux, an experimental producer inspired by Alexander’s physics (sample below). However, his idea is featured in the book titled “Enchanting Interdisciplinary Survey,” a “persuasive and interdisciplinary survey.” Jazz in Physics: The Secret Connection Between Music and the Structure of the Universe.
Alexander explains the link between jazz and physics in his ted talk and briefs Wired More videos. “One connection” is “a mysterious way that quantum particles move. … According to the rules of quantum mechanics,” they are “actually traversing all possible paths.” This says jazz musicians play with the way they improvise and every note you can think of on scale. His own improvisation is greatly enhanced by thinking about physics, he says. And in this he just follows the enormous steps of both idols.
It turns out that Coltrane himself uses Einstein’s theoretical physics to inform his understanding of the construction of jazz. As Ben Ratliff reports Coltrane: The Story of Soundthe incredible saxophonist, once brought to French horn player David Amram, “talking about incredible discourse about the symmetry of the solar system, how all of the universe’s black holes, constellations, the structure of the solar system, and how all of its complexity can be reduced to something very simple,” says Amram:
He then explained to me that he was trying to do something like that with music. It comes from the natural source, the blues and jazz tradition. However, there were completely different ways to see what’s natural about music.
While all this may sound rather vague and mystical, Alexander assures that our Coltrane method is very similar to that of Einstein. Gedankenexperiments (German for thought experiments).
Einstein, as I’ve noted before, was also a musician. He played the violin and piano, and he touched on his praises for Mozart. “Einstein used mathematical rigor,” says Alexander, “used creativity and intuition. He was an improviser of the mind, just like Mozart, the hero.” Alexander follows in 1967’s Coltrane Mandala, which says that “improvisation is a characteristic of both music and physics.” Coltrane “is a music innovator, physics at the fingertips,” and “Einstein was a physics innovator, music innovated at the fingertips.”
Alexander gets some more details in the lengthy TEDX talk above. I will start with my personal background on how he first came to understand physics and as an intuitive field closely related to music. For the real meat of his argument, you probably want to Read his bookNobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Cooper, future composer Brian Eno, and more wonderful hearts in both music and science.
Note: Previous versions of this post were published on our site in 2016.
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Josh Jones He is a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina. Follow him in @jdmagness
