Music and the Making of Modern Science - Brossura

Pesic, Peter

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0262543907 ISBN 13: 9780262543903

Casa editrice: The MIT Press, 2022

Riassunto

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory.

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. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line. 

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Sky in a Bottle; and Music and the Making of Modern Science, all published by the MIT Press.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: The MIT Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2022
• ISBN 10: 0262543907
• ISBN 13: 9780262543903
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 356
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile