Music and the making of modern science / Peter Pesic.

  • Pesic, Peter
Date:
[2014]
  • Books

About this work

Description

"In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, "liberal education" connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science--that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. 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." -- Publisher's description.

Publication/Creation

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2014]

Physical description

viii, 347 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Contributors

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-333) and index.

Contents

Music and the making of ancient science -- The dream of Oresme -- Moving the immovable -- Hearing the irrational -- Kepler and the song of the Earth -- Descartes' musical apprenticeship -- Mersenne's universal harmony -- Newton and the mystery of the major sixth -- Euler: the mathematics of musical sadness -- Euler: from sound to light -- Young's musical optics -- Electric sounds -- Hearing the field -- Helmholtz and the sirens -- Riemann and the sound of space -- Tuning the atoms -- Planck's cosmic harmonium -- Unheard harmonies.

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    IVH /PES
    Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780262027274
  • 0262027275