# The Jazz of Physics: Cosmologist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander on decoding the song of the Universe: Photos, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/04/11/the-jazz-of-physics-cosmologist-and-saxophonist-stephon-alexander-on-decoding-the-song-of-the-universe-photos-video/
- Published: 2019-04-11T20:58:02+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

“It is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.”

[⌊The Jazz of Physics: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander on Decoding
the Song of the Universe⌉⌊The Jazz of Physics: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon
Alexander on Decoding the Song of the Universe⌉[

“All truth is comprised in music and mathematics,” Margaret Fuller [wrote](https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/04/margaret-fuller-on-music/)
as she was spearheading the Transcendentalist movement and laying the groundwork
for what would later be called feminism.

A century and a half after Fuller, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and jazz 
saxophonist **Stephon Alexander**examines this dual seedbed of truth in The Jazz
of Physics (public library) — part memoir of his improbable path to science and 
music, part captivating primer on modern physics, part manifesto for the power of
cross-disciplinary thinking and improvisation in unlocking new chambers of possibility
for the human mind’s intercourse with the universe and the nature of reality.

Stephon Alexander

Drawing on the legacy of Kepler, who [composed the world’s first work of science fiction](https://books.google.com/books?id=qlhbDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=%22shadowing+the+light+of+immortality%22&source=bl&ots=RV-brPugmD&sig=ACfU3U0Esk5wrXGYKsXANmPcgmwf8UHsTg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwje44e4y_XgAhUMmuAKHa6lDtAQ6AEwAXoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22only%20the%20dreamer%20wakes%22&f=false)—
a clever allegory advancing the then-controversial Copernican model of the universe
through a conceptually ingenious analogy — Alexander writes:

Contrary to the logical structure innate in physical law, in our attempts to reveal
new vistas in our understanding, we often must embrace an irrational, illogical 
process, sometimes fraught with mistakes and improvisational thinking. Although 
it is important for both jazz musicians and physicists to strive for technical and
theoretical mastery in their respective disciplines, innovation demands that they
go beyond the skill sets they have mastered. Key to innovation in theoretical physics
is the power of analogical reasoning.

But while Alexander does draw heavily on analogies throughout the book, the parallels
and equivalences between music and physics are often far more literal. “It is less
about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical,” he writes,
reminding us that stars, galaxies, and planets arose from sound waves in the plasma
of the infant universe as spacetime vibrated like an instrument to produce the waves
that leavened these essential cosmic structures.

Born in Trinidad, Alexander fell in love with science shortly after his family moved
to the United States. Visiting the American Museum of Natural History with his third-
grade class, he was mesmerized by a set of papers behind a thick pane of glass, 
inscribed with symbols that seemed otherworldly to his eight-year-old consciousness.
Next to them was a portrait of their author — a wild-haired, mischievous-eyed oddball.
This was his first encounter with Einstein, who would go on to be a lifelong hero
as Alexander devoted himself to decoding the secrets of the universe.

![](https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/einstein_sound_1920.
jpg?resize=680%2C585&ssl=1)

Page proof corrections of Einstein’s paper _Propagation of Sound in Partly Dissociated
Gases_, in Einstein’s hand. (Einstein papers, Instituut-Lorentz)

A few years later, as a teenager in the Bronx, he had a parallel experience of encountering
a new, almost mystical language and recognizing it as an encoding of elemental truth.
Through the gateway of hip hop and its wide-ranging influences spanning Caribbean
and Latin music, Alexander discovered the saxophone and became besotted with the
free jazz of Ornette Coleman. His parents eventually bought him a vintage alto saxophone
at a garage sale, and so began his second great love affair with the universe. At
the intersection of these two loves, Alexander found his calling. Within a decade,
he was working on some of the most complex problems in modern physics by day, performing
with some of the most legendary jazz musicians by night, and cross-pollinating the
legacies of his great heroes: Einstein, Pythagoras, John Coltrane. He recounts a
defining moment: About a decade ago, I sat alone in a dim café on the main drag 
of Amherst, Massachusetts, preparing for a physics faculty job presentation when
an urge hit me. I found a pay phone with a local phone book and mustered up the 
courage to call Yusef Lateef, a legendary jazz musician, who had recently retired
from the music department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I had something
I had to tell him.

Like an addict after a fix, my fingers raced through the pages anxiously seeking
the number. I found it. The brisk wind of a New England autumn hit my face as I 
called him. At the risk of rudely imposing, I let the phone ring for quite a while.

“Hello?” a male voice finally answered.

“Hi, is Professor Lateef available?” I asked.

“Professor Lateef is not here,” said the voice, flatly.

“Could I leave him a message about the diagram that John Coltrane gave him as a 
birthday gift in ’61? I think I figured out what it means.”

There was a long pause. “Professor Lateef is here.”

We spoke for nearly two hours about the diagram that appeared in his acclaimed book
Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which is a compilation of a myriad of
scales from Europe, Asia, Africa, and all over the world. I expressed how I thought
the diagram was related to another and seemingly unrelated field of study — quantum
gravity — a grand theory intended to unify quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory
of general relativity. What I had realized, I told Lateef, was that the same geometric
principle that motivated Einstein’s theory was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram.

Part of Einstein’s genius, Alexander points out, was his willingness to leap beyond
the limits of his particular mathematical problem and into a field of possibilities,
which he explored through improvisational experimentation — _gedankenexperiments_,
or thought experiments. Einstein himself, who believed his best ideas came to him
during his violin breaks, called his ideation process “combinatory play” — a wilderness
of associations reaching across boundaries of various theories and fields of thought,
not as deliberate problem-solving but as unforced mental meanderings.

[[

Art by Vladimir Radunsky from On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein by 
Jennifer Berne.

Alexander, too, had a pivotal breakthrough in his scientific work during one such
unexpected cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines, which steered the direction
of his research in a way he could not have necessarily thought his way to directly
and deliberately. During his time at as a postdoctoral student at London’s Imperial
College, he met — at a “quantum gravity cocktail hour,” as one does — a serious-
looking man with a gold tooth, dressed in black, who engaged in intense conversations
about spacetime and relativity and the mathematics of waves. Alexander took him 
for a Russian physicist. He turned out to be the pioneering musician Brian Eno. 
The two soon became friends and Alexander came to see Eno as a singular species 
of “sound cosmologist.” He recounts the moment that catalyzed his breakthrough:

One of the most memorable and influential moments in my physics research occurred
one morning when I walked into Brian’s studio. Normally, Brian was working on the
details of a new tune — getting his bass sorted out just right for a track, getting
a line just slightly behind the beat. He was a pioneer of ambient music and a prolific
installation artist.

Eno described his work in the liner notes for his record, _Ambient 1: Music for 
Airports_: “Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention
without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
What he sought was a music of tone and atmosphere, rather than music that demanded
active listening. But creating an _easy_ listening track is anything but easy, so
he often had his head immersed in meticulous sound analysis.

That particular morning, Brian was manipulating waveforms on his computer with an
intimacy that made it feel as if he were speaking Wavalian, some native tongue of
sound waves. What struck me was that Brian was playing with, arguably, the most 
fundamental concept in the universe — the physics of vibration. To quantum physicists,
particles are described by the physics of vibration. And to quantum cosmologists,
vibrations of fundamental entities such as strings could possibly be the key to 
the physics of the entire universe. The quantum scales those strings play are, unfortunately,
terribly intangible, both mentally and physically, but there it was in front of 
me — sound — a _tangible_ manifestation of vibration.

[[

“Behavior of Waves” by Berenice Abbott, 1962.

This unexpected contact with sound made tangible shone a sidewise gleam on a question
Alexander had been puzzling over ever since graduate school, when he had asked his
mentor — the famed cosmologist Robert Brandenberger — what the most important question
in cosmology was. Rather than an expected answer, like what may have caused the 
Big Bang, Brandenberger surprised the young man with his response: “How did the 
large-scale structure in the universe emerge and evolve?” Suddenly, in watching 
Eno manipulate waveforms, Alexander had a revelation. He explains:

Sound is a vibration that pushes a medium, such as air or something solid, to create
traveling waves of pressure. Different sounds create different vibrations, which
in turn create different pressure waves. We can draw pictures of these waves, called
waveforms. A key point in the physics of vibrations is that every wave has a measurable
wavelength and height. With respect to sound, the wavelength dictates the pitch,
high or low, and the height, or amplitude, describes the volume.

If something is measurable, such as the length and height of waves, then you can
give it a number. If you can put a number to something, then you can add more than
one of them together, just by adding numbers together. And that’s what Brian was
doing — adding up waveforms to get new ones. He was mixing simpler waveforms to 
make intricate sounds.

To physicists, this notion of adding up waves is known as the Fourier transform.
It’s an intuitive idea, clearly demonstrated by dropping stones in a pond. If you
drop a stone in a pond, a circular wave of a definite frequency radiates from the
point of contact. If you drop another stone nearby, a second circular wave radiates
outward, and the waves from the two stones start to interfere with each other, creating
a more complicated wave pattern. What is incredible about the Fourier idea is that
_any_ waveform can be constructed by adding waves of the simplest form together.
These simple “pure waves” are ones that regularly repeat themselves.

I was enthralled by the idea of decoding what I saw as the Rosetta stone of vibration—
there was the known language of how waves create sound and music, which Eno was 
clearly skilled with, and then there was the unclear vibrational message of the 
quantum behavior in the early universe and how it has created large-scale structures.
Waves and vibration make up the common thread, but the challenge was to link them
in order to draw a clearer picture of how structure is formed and, ultimately, us.

In the remainder of The Jazz of Physics, Alexander explores how these questions 
reverberate through the consciousness of our species, from Pythagoras to string 
theory and beyond, into the future of probing the unfathomed depths of reality. 
Couple it with Nick Cave on music, transcendence, and artificial intelligence, then
revisit the fascinating story of the century-long quest to hear the sound of spacetime.

[[

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