Related papers: Galilei and Huygens: Music and science
The art of advertising one's scientific achievements, of which Galileo was an early master, is a trademark of successful modern science. Dedicated believers and mystics of science, such as Kepler, are less popular. Yet, an alleged rigorous…
To many people, music is a mystery. It is uniquely human, because no other species produces elaborate, well organized sound for no particular reason. It has been part of every known civilization on earth. It has become a very part of man's…
What can physics students learn about science from those scientists who got the answers wrong? Students encounter little science history, and what they have encountered typically portrays scientists as The People with the Right Answers. But…
The LIGO results are among the greatest experimental achievements of all times. Time and again scientists have compared this feat to Galileo pointing his telescope to the sky, offering instead an 'ear' to the cosmos. After the remarkable…
In this work, an attempt is presented to understand the contribution of Galileo Galilei in the field of the History of Ideas, from the moment he points a spyglass to the sky. For that, it was previously necessary that Giotto painting the…
Both, human appreciation of music and musical genres, transcend time and space. The universality of musical genres and associated musical scales is intimately linked to the physics of sound and the special characteristics of human acoustic…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
I offer a revisionist interpretation of Galileo's role in the history of science. My overarching thesis is that Galileo lacked technical ability in mathematics, and that this can be seen as directly explaining numerous aspects of his life's…
In this reminiscence I discuss the influence of Henry Eyring and John Barker upon my life and work. Others, especially my family, have been of even greater personal influence. However, these two great and grand men were of tremendous…
The Scientific Revolution sweeping through seventeenth-century Europe led to unprecedented intellectual and scientific insights and high-profile technological developments. Combined with a significant worldwide increase in naval commerce,…
A set of basic notes, or `scale', forms the basis of music. Scales are specific to specific genre of music. In this second article of the series we explore the development of various scales associated with western classical music, arguably…
Gioseffo Zarlino reintroduced the Pythagorean paradigm into Renaissance musical theory. In a similar fashion, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton reinvigorated Pythagorean ideas in celestial mechanics;…
In the 17th Century, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the scientific revolution. Much of the correspondence among contemporary scientists and their associates is now digitally available through the ePistolarium webtool,…
Supportive attitudes can bring to a blossoming science, while neglect can quickly make science absent from everyday life and provide a very primitive view of the world. We compare one important Greek achievement, the computation of the…
The collaboration of mathematics in the two musical systems of Pythagorean sounds and of equal sounds is evident and opportune for generating the elements and managing their relationships. The only essential notion for a rational…
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens refined Archimedes' celebrated geometrical computation of $\pi$ to its highest point. Yet the rich content of his beautiful treatise \emph{De circuli magnitudine inventa} (1654) has apparently never…
In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…
Some little step forward is made in the analysis of the mathematical structure of Tonal Harmony, a task begun by Galilei, Euler and the Lagrange of the first two volumes of Miscellania Taurinensia
In "On the Heavens" Aristotle criticizes the Pythagorean point of view which claims the existence of a cosmic music and a cosmic sound. According to the Pythagorean argument, there exists a cosmic music produced by stars and planets. These…
I report the results of the internet quiz, where the takers had to tell the music of Mozart from that of Salieri. The average score earned by over eleven thousand quiz-takers is 61%. This suggests that the music of Mozart is of about the…