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SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
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Twentieth-century theoretical physics and music
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In Charles Kahn’s overview of the Pythagorean tradition I have cited above, he asserts that there has been a strong resurgence of Pythagoreanism in modern Western culture. In spite of this revival, he notes with regret that the phenomenon has not yet received adequate consideration from professional historians of ancient Pythagoreanism. This is in itself a very striking fact; however, what I find particularly interesting is the concluding paragraph of his book. There Kahn explicitly mentions what he means by a revival of the Pythagorean thought:
If, as Whitehead and others supposed, Pythagoras and his followers had dimly divined “the possible importance of mathematics in the formation of science,” then it is obvious that a modern scientist like Einstein is “following the pure Pythagorean tradition.”[source]
From this last paragraph it can be understood that Einstein’s philosophical thought is a consequence of this revival. To show that he is also a cause of the reinforcement of the Pythagorean tradition during the twentieth century is part of the aim of this section. The other implication of the passage, that Pythagoreanism has penetrated modern physics, is something that hardly anyone would deny. From string theorists to historians of science and philosophers, there is wide consensus that modern physics is somehow Pythagorean. Sometimes not only “is” but “must be” is alleged. What is more, this resumption of Pythagoreanism in modern science is stronger in theoretical physics than it is in any other field of research. Let us then retrace the story of the relationship between physics and music with some salient figures of early modern theoretical physics. This will provide us with a satisfactory answer to Kuhn’s query and, finally, an understanding of string theory’s association with music.
That Einstein was a passionate musician is well-known. Every single written biography, museum exhibition, television program, magazine or newspaper article, repeats it over and over again. In one famous biography we read: “A Einstein le apacionaba la música de Mozart porque en ella encontraba lo que había buscado siempre en la ciencia: belleza, claridad, sencillez.”[source] This observation comes accompanied with the famous photograph where Einstein appears playing the violin. Another biographer makes a similar assertion: “Il a cherché l’harmonie de l’univers dans la musique aussi bien que dans la physique mathématique et ces deux domaines l’ont retenu tout au long de son existence.”[source] Einstein himself once said: “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” Of course, similar comments can be found in many other languages. Pages and pages could be filled with such testimonies. Since, as I have previously said, this is one of Einstein’s best known facets, let us move to another early theoretical physicist.
“The dean and definition of theoretical physics in Germany” at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is how John Heilbron introduces Max Planck.[source] Like Einstein, Planck loved music. In their comprehensive history of the beginnings of German theoretical physics, Jungnickel and McCormmach affirm that Planck “early considered making a career in music, but he decided that he lacked talent for composition; he considered the humanities, too, and he later supposed he might have made a passable philologist or historian.”[source] It is not worthless saying a few words about Planck. He was born in 1858 to Wilhelm Johan Julius Planck, who came from a long line of theologians and lawyers, and Emma Patzig, born into a family of pastors. The Plancks were a typical upper-class educated family of nineteenth-century Germany. That is, they were members of that social class which several years later would constitute the strongest social support for the German monarchy. Under these circumstances, the young Max grew up in an intellectual milieu, made up mainly of professors, lawyers, clerics and high government officials. When the family moved to Munich, Max Planck attended, as was expected from a young man in his position, the gymnasium. In effect, the gymnasium was a precondition for anybody wanting to pursue an academic career. During those years Max Planck acted the young patrician; interested in literary meetings and high society cultural conversations. Many years later Planck would remember this as the period of his life when began his greatest passion: “To investigate the harmony that reigns between the strictness of mathematics and the multitude of natural laws.”[source] In the gymnasium, he attended elementary mathematics and physics courses, subjects to which he devoted special attention and encouraged him to opt for physics at university. But, at the same time he was very engaged in musical affairs. Among other activities he composed songs which were executed in student and music halls, he was a talented player of various instruments, he performed at public presentations, he studied music theory assiduously, and he conducted an orchestra. Physics and music were two of his most adored subjects during his studies at the University of Munich, but he finally resolved himself to the study of natural sciences. Heilbron points to a possible explanation as to why Planck chose physics instead of music: “It [thermodynamics] claimed a universal dominion to which all the laws of physics had to conform, and it dealt with the permanent and the unchanging, which physicists since Aristotle had identified with the true and the good. Such lofty considerations, Planck wrote at the end of his long life, had brought him to physics instead of to mathematics or history or music.”[source] Nevertheless, why Planck thought that physics “dealt with the permanent and the unchanging” more than mathematics, or music, is not clear from this explanation. The point is that he decided on physics on the basis of a sort of Pythagorean argument. This difficult decision, however, did not mean he drifted away from music. In later years he attained a genuine professional level on the piano. He played several times in the company of his friend and prominent violinist Joseph Joachim. On several occasions Einstein joined them. Heilbron also notes that Planck had achieved such a musical sensitivity that he could scarcely enjoy the concerts he attended. According to the biographer, Planck’s preference for composers such as Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, and Bach (some parts of his Saint Matthew Passion) were part of his inherent romanticism, which “was a piece with his quest for a super- or transhumant world picture and with his sense of tradition and country.”[source] Planck’s example alone seems to be a strong case in favour of those declaring a transcendent connection between music and theoretical physics. But, there is still more.
Music was also an important aspect of Werner Heisenberg’s life. His fervour for music was, at least, as intense as that felt by Einstein and Planck. Coming from an upper middle class family, Werner entered, as expected, the gymnasium. He went in 1911 to the discerning and elite Maximilian gymnasium in Munich; forty years after Max Planck. For Heisenberg, as it had been for his predecessor, it was a hard decision to choose physics over music. He had loved music since he was a child. And, unlike many other music enthusiasts, this powerful emotion was not mere contemplation ― for him, music was a real obsession. He used to spend hours and hours in front of the piano trying to master the instrument, repeating incessantly the most challenging pieces or performing the assignments given to him by his private teacher. The latter was a celebrated pianist in Munich. Barbara Blum, one of Heisenberg’s daughters, said of him: “His teacher, Hans Beltz, was not unknown: he gave concerts in various places in Germany and seems to have had critical acclaim. Beltz taught him a basic routine for practicing his technique and above all the theoretical foundation for a methodical access to music: cadenzas, bass line, counter point, sonata form, thematic development, analysis of a fugue, etc.”[source] The ability gained by Heisenberg with his assiduous practice was subsequently exhibited in many public presentations. It is clear then that it was not easy for him to choose between physics and music. As David Cassidy relates: “In Physics and Beyond [Heisenberg’s autobiography], Heisenberg recalls a long discussion with Rolf Walter, and Walter’s mother about his decision, soon after entering the university, to make a career of atomic physics rather than classical music.”[source] However, his devotion to music remained over the years. Evoking her childhood, Barbara Blum remembered: “When we were little, we were lulled to sleep by my father’s nightly practice of scales and finger exercises.” This systematic training had for Heisenberg a special significance: “This analytical work, in particular, aroused his greatest interest, since he now could detect in music mathematically structured principles not unlike those in science.”[source] Thus, if Heisenberg “loved music as a source of beauty and harmony,” as he says in his autobiography, it is not due only to the kind of spiritual serenity that many find in music, but because the intricacy of a musical composition revealed somehow the “meaningfully ordered world.”
Max Born, another prominent contributor to early quantum mechanics, was a devoted musician, too. As his mother had died when he was still a child, his father, a medical scientist, was responsible for his early education. After the death of his father, when he was an adolescent, he then began to frequent more often his mother’s family. It happened that in contrast to his father’s scientific vocation, his mother’s side was more culturally oriented; a fact that the young Born found fascinating. The house of the Kauffmanns was regularly visited by many musicians, including celebrated pianists who took pleasure in playing the two grand pianos in the designated music room. Like Planck and Heisenberg, Born studied music theory diligently and practiced as much as he could. Years later, when he moved to Göttingen, he found in Heisenberg the perfect partner with whom to share his passion. For Heisenberg’s twenty-first birthday, Born, who at that time was thirty-nine, played Mozart and Beethoven pieces. Heisenberg remembers that agreeable occasion with joy: “We played a Mozart and a Beethoven Piano Concerto on two pianos, that is, one piano took on the orchestra part. Especially the Beethoven Concerto – which was new to me – was incredibly beautiful.”[source] Born loved music throughout his entire lifetime. Even during the hard wartime years of the forties he found solace in music. In a letter sent to his son during the Second World War he alternated war news with musical interests. Especially in the music of Bach, Schubert, and Brahms, could Born feel “the noble form of romanticism … the key to all that is bitter ad sweet, great and gentle in human life.”[source]
After all these examples, the conjecture stating that there is a deep connection between music and physics, as the ancient believed, seems very plausible. However, not every physicist of the early twentieth century had this penchant for music. Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Paul Dirac, for example, were not interested in music at all. According to a biographer, Schrödinger himself gave details concerning his aversion to music: “Almost uniquely among theoretical physicists, Erwin not only did not play any instrument himself, but even displayed an active dislike for most kinds of music, except the occasional love song. He once ascribed this antipathy to the fact that his mother died from a cancer of the breast, which he thought was caused by mechanical trauma from her violin.” Forthwith, the biographer provides his own explanation: “More likely he learned this distaste for music as a child, echoing his father’s lack of response to this mother’s art.”[source] Abraham Pais, biographer of both Einstein and Bohr, was categorical about the role of music in Bohr’s life and work: “Music was a profound necessity in Einstein’s life, not in Bohr’s.”[source] Bohr was interested in other artistic expressions, such as visual art, but “music played no role to speak of in Bohr’s life.”[source] The historian of physics Helge Kragh appropriately describes the cultural environment surrounding the young Dirac: “Unlike other great physicists – Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, for example – Paul Dirac did not grow up under conditions that were culturally or socially stimulating. Art, poetry, and music were unknown elements during his early years, and discussions were not welcomed in the house of Monk Road.”[source] About Dirac’s taste for music, Kragh recounts an illustrative story. Once Heisenberg played several piano pieces and then asked him what he thought about them. Being an accomplished pianist, for sure Heisenberg was waiting for a suitable comment; however, Dirac plainly replied, “the one in which you crossed your hand.”[source] And this was a lifetime attitude, “as to art, music, and literature, Dirac was ignorant and mostly indifferent.”[source]
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SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
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*******You can read this blog for free! Please, do not copy its content.*******To show in detail why Schrödinger, Bohr, and Dirac, did not feel particularly attracted to music, or even disliked it as in the first case, is out of the scope of this essay. What should be retained from these instances, though, is that the relationship a physicist has with music depends decisively on the specific social circumstances in which they were brought up and educated. There is no supernatural or psychological connection between physics and music beyond these concrete realities. In her biography of Max Born, Greenspan asserts that: “A gift for music is not uncommon among theoretical physicists and mathematicians. Like mathematics – in representing extraordinary creations with its symbolic language – music seems to produce a sense of the familiar in the physicist’s mind. Einstein a violinist, thought that his music and work were both ‘born of the same source and complement each other through the satisfaction they bestow.’”[source] Well, there is no real evidence for such a “gift.” From my point of view, this is simply a myth. What determined Einstein’s, Planck’s, Heisenberg’s, and Born’s fascination with music was a set of definite conditions: educational, cultural, socio-economic, religious, psychological, and so on. Of course, they too were not raised in identical milieus and consequently did not think of the relationship in the same way: Einstein was a Jew, Planck came from a conservative patrician family, Heisenberg’s family aspired to social reforms that could improve their status, and Born was educated without a maternal figure. However, in spite of these differences there are some shared general characteristics that allow us to group them. What follows is my explanation; a sociological one rather than mystical.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, German educational programs were the subject of intense reforms as they adjusted them to the new demands of society. The educational reforms aimed at elevating the cultural level of all strata of German society, and very particularly that of the upper classes. In addition to the economic benefits that it was hoped these reforms would bring, cultural pride and national ambition were too at stake. The cultural heritage sustaining these aspirations was very rich: philosophy, with the early German idealism; visual arts and literature, with Romanticism; and music, with late Baroque and Classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert (strictly speaking the last two composers were Austrian, however, remember that the Austrian Empire maintained strong links, and not just linguistic, with German lands; the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia were the two main states constituting the German Confederation founded in 1815). It is no coincidence that the reorganization of the school curriculum occurred at the same time as a liberal and nationalistic bourgeoisie was gaining relevance. This happened during and after the Napoleonic wars, when many young intellectuals started to proclaim a new type of society. Industrialists, professionals, lawyers, bankers, and traders, constituted the new active class. In contrast to nobility, which received status through inheritance, the ascending bourgeoisie stimulated cultural achievements as its distinctive social feature. High culture, including classical languages, philosophy, music and literature, would have to be an integral part of the German identity. It was also intended that educational reforms would develop the potential of the individual – a characteristic trait of the new mode of production. One thing that the reform stipulated was obligatory schooling for every child in the Germanic lands. Music, in particular, was valued as “an art that developed ‘the disposition for regularity, accuracy, order, and harmony’” so desired and needed by the ascending bourgeoisie. In this sense, the idea of a new generation of citizens educated in the spirit of the great German culture, including of course its musical legacy, was at the base of the model society the ascending bourgeoisie expected to rule in the future. “Elementary music education thus occupied a crucial role in a vision of music as a part of a larger project of cultivation.”[source] This general attitude towards music was reinforced throughout the century and became even more significant following the German Empire foundation in 1871. The parents of the young Germans tried to inculcate them the high values of their national identity through musical culture. For future professionals, most of them coming from the middle and upper classes, music instruction was also mandatory. All the German physicists discussed above had their first contact with music at a tender age, and cultivated it through the years. They were members of the academic bourgeoisie, the Bildungsbürgertum, which struggled persistently to ascend in nineteenth-century German society. The Heisenbergs were a typical family. As Cassidy notes, “public deportment and professional demeanor were expected to reflect their superior social station” and “allegiance to nationalist trappings.” This included being infused with the bourgeoisie musical culture and taking part in it. In later years, Heisenberg used his musical knowledge and talent to make his way into the elite crowd. The biographer also notes: “Musical pleasures were indeed more serious than mere relaxation and escape: music also provided Heisenberg a direct entrée into the elite social circles of Leipzig.”[source] With certain variations, some of them sketched above, this situation applies to Einstein’s, Planck’s, and Born’s experience with music. However, in contrast to this tradition prevalent in Germany, it was different in other countries. For instance, Dirac’s education was not oriented to humanistic studies – and this was certainly the case for many other English theoretical physicists: “Like most schools in England at the time, this school [Dirac’s] did not emphasize classics or the arts but concentrated instead on science, practical subjects, and modern languages.”[source]
This short account should explain why so many early twentieth-century German physicists had a special feeling for music, or, more specifically, for classical music. But, this was not all. The predisposition gained in their early school years was then reinforced when they began their more advanced academic studies. Consider for example the case of Woldemar Voigt. Nowadays few physicists have heard of him, nonetheless, he was an authority in crystallography at the turn of the century. Like other German physicists in this story, it was not easy for him to decide between physics and music: “Although he was drawn to music as well as to physics, he doubted that he had the talent to make a career in music and decided for physics instead.”[source] The symmetry of crystal physics was admired by Voigt, who explicitly made this clear in his classic textbook Lehrbuch der Kristallphysik. As Jungnickel and McCormmach recall:
Voigt called on an image drawn from his other great intellectual love, music: if every player in an orchestra played the same piece, but not in unison, the result would have no esthetic appeal; molecules in gases, liquids, and amorphous solids produced “music” of just that sort. But if the players played in harmony, the result would be like the “music” of crystals. That was why certain phenomena occurring with “wonderful manifoldness and elegance” in crystals occurred only in “sad monotone average values” in other bodies. “According to my feeling,” Voigt said, “the music of physical regularities is intoned in no other field in such and rich chords as in crystal physics.”[source]
This is an association that Voigt also emphasized in 1905, on the occasion of the opening of the new physics department building at Göttingen University. I will not extend on Voigt’s observations, I shall comment, instead, on the place where Voigt gave the speech: Göttingen University. Firstly, with outstanding figures such as David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, Göttingen University was the early twentieth century mecca for mathematical physics. Secondly, it was precisely in this institution where mathematics and physics fused in an unprecedented manner, giving rise to what we now call theoretical physics. Thirdly, in Göttingen, Max Born, Pascual Jordan, and Werner Heisenberg wrote the papers that revolutionized our understanding of the microscopic physical world. They worked in close collaboration with the mathematicians. The three of them formed what was known as the Göttingen School. Fourthly, in Göttingen a kind of Pythagorean mysticism was associated with mathematics: “Weyl’s goal was to reveal,” quotes the historian of science Lewis Pyenson, “a few of the fundamental chords from that harmony of the spheres of which Pythagoras and Kepler once dreamed.”[source] Fifthly, under the auspices of Felix Klein, Göttingen University promoted school reforms that changed the way mathematics was taught at all levels in Germany. Many of these recommendations where then implemented in many countries around the world. In Göttingen it was defined for decades to come, and still holds today, what is and what is not theoretical physics. Perhaps there were some theoretical physicists before Göttingen, but not theoretical physics and as an institutionalized practice.
Before concluding this first part of this essay, I would like to say a few words about Arnold Sommerfeld. As a young physicist he worked first in Göttingen as Felix Klein’s assistant and then became his collaborator. He then moved to the University of Munich were he taught and advised innumerable students. In 1919 he published the lectures on atomic theory which he had taught there during the academic year 1916–1917. The influence of Sommerfeld and in particular of his Atombau und Spektrallinien was immense. Helge Kragh tells us about the real impact of the book: “During subsequent years, it ran through several new editions and became the ‘bible’ of atomic theory to the postwar generation of physicists. In 1923 the third German edition was translated into English as Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines.”[source] This book encloses something especially pertinent to our analysis. In the “bible” of atomic spectra Sommerfeld makes explicit reference to the music of the spheres of the Pythagorean tradition. I guess that the impact this observation must have had in all those students learning quantum physics with Sommerfeld’s book was huge. However its effect propagated well beyond the physics community. For instance, the Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz quoted the abovementioned passage in one of her books.
What we hear today in the language of the spectra is a real music of the spheres of the atom, a concord of whole numbers, numerical relations, a progressive order and harmony of all diversities. … In the final analysis all whole-number laws of the spectral lines and the atom are derived from quantum theory. It is the mysterious organ on which Nature plays the music of the spectra according to those rhythms it controls the structure of the atom and its nucleus.[source]
In which way Sommerfeld influenced the future of physics is hard to quantify. In particular if we think that he was the PhD advisor of several great physicists, including Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli. Once, Pauli characterised Sommerfeld’s understanding of the Zeeman Effect in the following terms: “Sommerfeld tried to overcome the difficulties … by following, as Kepler once did in his investigations of the planetary system, an inner feeling of harmony.”[source]
We have seen that German physicists, such as Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, and Born, were those that “had great difficulty choosing between a scientific and a musical career,” as Kuhn said. Victor Weisskopf, the great Austrian theoretical physicist and fervent musician, is our final example: “Among his passions was music. In his youth, Viki became an accomplished pianist and even considered a career as a professional musician.”[source] The social role of serious music in the constitution of German society cannot be understated since musical knowledge represented a valuable cultural capital for those who possessed it. This has affected the way we associate music with theoretical physics today.
After the Second World War, physics in Germany changed irrevocably. Many German physicists left the country, predominantly for the United States of America. This period, the cold war, was dominated by applied science. The historian of science David Kaiser says of physics at that time: “Thus the pattern seems clear. Where enrolment pressures loomed largest, physicists on both sides of the Iron curtain drilled their students to ‘turn the crank’ and work through more and more quantitative problems, rather than spend their times philosophizing.”[source] This rejection of philosophical debate in science was enduring and extended to almost every area of physics. Einstein’s and Bohr’s concerns were a matter for philosophers. If any physicist did still timidly dare to treat philosophical issues, it was in quantum mechanics: Bell’s inequalities, Aspect’s experiments, the many worlds interpretation, and other related things. All other philosophical topics were banned from any “serious” physical discussion. This was, of course, applied to mystical beliefs such as a possible relationship between music and physics. Such discussions abounded in philosophical and mystical texts but not in physics. In his extensive experience writing on the connection music has with physics, Jamie James remembers that: “But even the purest of the pure scientists would smile at the naïveté of such questions, and tell us that they are imponderables, incommensurables matters better left to the philosophers and theologians.”[source] It was only through popular physics that the subject would re-emerge.
The astonishing observable order of the universe has been a favourite subject for science writers ever since popular science first gained an established readership. In the early decades of the twentieth century, books such Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation and The Nature of the Physical World, as well as Jean’s The Mysterius Universe, achieved real success. Both of them later wrote, during the war, on philosophical issues related to science: Eddington published The Philosophy of Physical Science, and Jean his Physics and Philosophy. According to the literary critic Elizabeth Leane, the rhetorical style employed by Jean, “with its sublime metaphors,” “can be heard throughout the physics popularizations of the late twentieth-century boom.”[source] After the war, as noted above, physicists rejected philosophical discussion and were more interested in practical issues that could bring tangible social, or political, benefits; something that was reflected in the areas of physics which were popularized. With the space race between the two superpowers the cosmos and its exploration became again one of the favoured subjects of popular physics. “One of the exceptions to the slump in popular physics publishing, according to [Paul] Davies, was popular astronomy; this perhaps reflects the excitement of the space race, as well as the dissociation of this field from weapons and other immediate human concerns.”[source] With books such as Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes (1977), the public became familiar with the origin and destiny of our universe. However, it is worth saying that these books did not ponder mystical issues such as the music of the cosmos, but rather concentrated on showing “objectively” to the reader the marvel of the physics of the universe. This trend became more popular when Cosmos: A personal Voyage, by Carl Sagan, was broadcast in 1980. Cosmos was an immediate success; it was watched by millions and millions of people around the globe. “Cosmos was the first science TV blockbuster, and Carl Sagan was its (human) star. By the time of Sagan’s death in 1996, the series had been seen by half a billion people; Sagan was perhaps the best-known scientist on the planet.”[source] In addition to the television series, there was also a book which accompanied it. Another success! As can be read on the front cover of a recent edition (in big capital letters): “THE #1 BESTSELLER. MORE THAN FIVE MILLION COPIES IN PRINT.” Presented as historical overviews of the evolution of astronomical and cosmological discoveries, the reality is that the book and the TV program were far from historically accurate. This was in great part due to the mystic-philosophical commentaries made by Sagan (most notably, his manifest intention to present the history of science as a journey towards a final answer to the significance of humankind in the universe). For example, Sagan introduced his “voyage” as follows: “We’re going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination, unfettered by ordinary limits on speed and size, drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies. It can take us anywhere in space and time. Perfect as a snowflake, organic as a dandelion seed, it will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts. Come with me.”[source] (Italics added.) Kepler is introduced in the episode “The Harmony of the Worlds” [source] as “the man who sought harmony in the cosmos” and discovered it: “His three laws of planetary motion represent, as we now know, a real harmony of the worlds.” This cosmic harmony, or “music of the spheres” as Kepler explicitly called it, meant “that we can find a resonance, a harmony between the way we think and the way the world works.” Simply another way to say that the human soul participates in the divine harmony of the cosmos, as Iamblichus put it in the third century AD (see above).
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SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
SELECTED READINGS FOR ESSAY 2 (III)
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