cris545
08/12/06, 09:41 AM
you might like this.
good physicistsmake good musicians (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug06/physics.music.html)
Albert Einstein played the violin. Werner Heisenberg was a distinguished pianist. Richard Feynman played ... well, the bongos. But you get the idea. Music and physics seem like disciplines on the opposite ends of a spectrum. One, you might say, is cerebral, concrete and evidence-based. The other is ethereal, changeable and subjective.
Yet, good physicists are very often good musicians. No one seems quite able to pinpoint the connection -- but more than a few are pretty sure that one exists.
At Cornell, the physics department in Clark Hall is home to a substantial chunk of the university's musicians -- including, perhaps most notably, David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics, former director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics, and pianist. "Music I find deeply mysterious," Mermin says. "In a certain sense it has no content except formal content. It's relations between sounds; it's putting sounds together in ways that make beautiful patterns. It's entirely nonverbal ... and yet it says something. It's a marvelous demonstration that mentality is not just talking to yourself -- that there are other ways of communicating very directly.
"Physics also erects very beautiful formal structures," he adds, "which can be described in ordinary language, but with difficulty. They're both creative acts. Physics at its best is an art form. It's a language of its own." Read More. (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug06/physics.music.html)
good physicistsmake good musicians (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug06/physics.music.html)
Albert Einstein played the violin. Werner Heisenberg was a distinguished pianist. Richard Feynman played ... well, the bongos. But you get the idea. Music and physics seem like disciplines on the opposite ends of a spectrum. One, you might say, is cerebral, concrete and evidence-based. The other is ethereal, changeable and subjective.
Yet, good physicists are very often good musicians. No one seems quite able to pinpoint the connection -- but more than a few are pretty sure that one exists.
At Cornell, the physics department in Clark Hall is home to a substantial chunk of the university's musicians -- including, perhaps most notably, David Mermin, the Horace White Professor of Physics, former director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics, and pianist. "Music I find deeply mysterious," Mermin says. "In a certain sense it has no content except formal content. It's relations between sounds; it's putting sounds together in ways that make beautiful patterns. It's entirely nonverbal ... and yet it says something. It's a marvelous demonstration that mentality is not just talking to yourself -- that there are other ways of communicating very directly.
"Physics also erects very beautiful formal structures," he adds, "which can be described in ordinary language, but with difficulty. They're both creative acts. Physics at its best is an art form. It's a language of its own." Read More. (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug06/physics.music.html)