Music of the Cosmos

 In the good old days when the liberal arts ruled the world of learning, the quadrivium paired arts as they set out to describe the world of extension—which meant the world outside of ourselves, where “ourselves” was described, or rather trained, by the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.  The arts of the quadrivium were paired as follows:  arithmetic and music; geometry and astronomy.

 

Why geometry and astronomy were paired is more or less a gimme, I think.  Arithmetic and music as a pair may need some explanation.  The idea was that as arithmetic reveals the harmony or numbers, so music (which was not about the specifics of instrumentation or learning how to play those instruments) reveals the harmony of the cosmos—think music of the spheres in the background.

 

Nowadays the art of arithmetic has fragmented all over the place.  Arithmetic?  Well what about calculus or vector analysis or topology or . . . . The connection of arithmetic and music is still in play (so to speak) insofar as there’s a persistent connection between musicianship and mathematics, and between musicology and the relationship of number to number.

 

And then string theory comes along.  I don’t know much, or anything at all for that matter, about the innards of string theory.  But the concept is clear enough.  Physical “reality” is composed (!) of infinitesimally tiny strings of something or other (energy? but then e = mcˆ2).  The difference between one kind of physical “reality” and another—say an up quark as opposed to a strange quark—depends on how those infinitesimally tiny strings vibrate.

 

It follows, then, that music, the harmony of all those strings, is what creates “reality.”  So we’re back where we started, with the arithmetic of the vibration of strings producing the musical harmony of reality.

 

Ain’t science wonderful?