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    The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
    The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
    The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

    Written by Stephon Alexander

    Narrated by Don Hagen

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe.

    Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim-The Jazz of Physics revisits the ancient realm where music, physics, and the cosmos were one. This cosmological journey accompanies Alexander's own tale of struggling to reconcile his passion for music and physics, from taking music lessons as a boy in the Bronx to studying theoretical physics at Imperial College, London's inner sanctum of string theory. Playing the saxophone and improvising with equations, Alexander uncovered the connection between the fundamental waves that make up sound and the fundamental waves that make up everything else. As he reveals, the ancient poetic idea of the “music of the spheres,” taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.

    Whether you are more familiar with Brian Greene or Brian Eno, John Coltrane or John Wheeler, the Five Percent Nation or why the universe is less than five percent visible, there is a new discovery every minute. Covering the entire history of the universe from its birth to its fate, its structure on the smallest and largest scales, The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateJun 1, 2016
    ISBN9781469034300
    The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

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    Reviews for The Jazz of Physics

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    • 5/5
      Brilliant idea to combine jazz and physics. I learnt a lot about both. I will be working on my major and minor pentatonic scales! Probably will not be doing any theoretical physics though.
      He probably makes a mistake by dismissing intelligent design ( God).
      Still I thoroughly enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      This was a book that I was looking forward to reading. Two words caught my fancy: Physics and Jazz.Alexander is an accomplished physicist and a working musician. He was fascinated by both parts of his life when he was a child and managed to be able to do quite well in both spheres as an adult. He was able to convey his own natural attraction and obsession to both physics and jazz in a very natural and passionate way. He does an excellent job in eliciting in me a corresponding response in me that was as natural and passionate as his. His intent is to present the advanced physics that he is working on as an academic as being analogous to the jazz improvisations that he is working on as a gigging jazz musician. Unfortunately, he was much less successful. My own expertise in both physics and jazz are skin deep at best. Physics being more naturally aligned with my engineering training, while jazz is limited by scant my musical background. So it would seem to be natural that his explanations of the physics would be easier for me to comprehend, it wasn’t. In fact the musical analogies that he explained made much more sense that his explanations of physics. As I slogged through the explanations, I wondered about the more general audience, whether they were having as difficult of a time as I was. The center motif that he presented at the beginning of the book involved John Coltrane’s mandala in which Coltrane was trying to create a connection with his own very original musical expressions with the evolution of modern physics during that time. Coltrane worshiped Einstein and his ideas, for example. According to Alexander, Coltrane’s last three albums were his own experimentation with the mathematical ideas that Einstein had speculated upon. Taking inspiration from arguably the most prominent minds of their era, in completely disparate areas of achievement, Alexander decided to work on both simultaneously. Of course, this was not a conscious choice, he had been foundering in his physics career since physics had become a calculators domain with the mathematics heavy emphasis on the superstring theory. Indeed, Alexander employed the method of no method, or the idea of wu-wei to use jazz as a means of training his mind in a way that perhaps the jazz could elicit some original ideas in his physics. By the accounts in the book, he was indeed successful in doing good physics while also playing some good jazz. What he failed to do in the book however, was cogently leading us through his maze of twin spheres of influence and the complexity contained therein with each one. While he did a very admirable job trying to explain himself, I suspect that the culprit is more the complexity of the subjects rather than his familiarity with both subjects. Indeed, the book would be 100 times longer if he had indeed taken care to explain the minutiae of the two subjects. His hope of using analogy rather than detailed explanations to convey his message was somewhat successful but also somewhat a failure. But no matter, because the book did a great job of creating an ethos of what he was trying to convey, and there was a denouement of sorts toward the end. I will never listen to Coltrane again, and I will now understand a little bit better what all the fuss about modern physics is in regard, so I can say that I learned something new.
    • 5/5
      This is a book I'll read again one, Stephon Alexander does a great job explaining physics, jazz and cosmology in a way I could (mostly) understand.