For Sunday reflection, from Stephon Alexander’s “The Jazz of Physics”:
“Humans are the only creatures that can discover advanced mathematics, and the only creatures that can create and formalize music. If the beauty and physics of the universe, and the beauty and physics of music are linked, the links exist uniquely in human brains… What makes us uniquely able to do what nonhuman brains cannot: appreciate music and understand mathematics? And to create new things under the sun: compose, improvise, discover new mathematical facts about the universe?
“A few musicians, like Coltrane, have an uncanny ability to improvise, to find the hidden patterns and regularities underlying harmonic forms and to use those insights to generate brand-new kinds of melodic sequences. And a few scientists, like Einstein, can find regularities that have eluded even other great scientists — such as taking the Maxwell equations and reducing them into a single unifying formulation.”
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