The secret link between jazz and physics: how Einstein and Coltrane shared improvisation and intuition in common

Scientists need hobby. EXTENING WORK OF Navigation on complex theory and policy of the academic world can go to a person, even that as relaxed Professor and astrophysicist at Brown Stephon University Alexander University. Alexandre therefore plays the saxophone, but at this stage, it may not be correct to call his avocation a pursuit of free time, because John Coltrane has become as important for him as Einstein, Kepler and Newton.

Coltrane, he says, in a Ted conversation at 7 minutes above, “changed all my research management … led to a discovery in physics.” Alexander then continues to play the familiar opening bars of “Giant steps. “It is not Coltrane, but he is a very creative thinker whose love of jazz gave him a unique perspective on theoretical physics, that which he shares, it turns out that, with Einstein and Coltrane, who considered music and physics as intuitive and improvised activities.

Alexander describes his jazz epiphany as caused by a complex diagram Coltrane gave the legendary jazz musician and professor of the University of Massachusetts Yusef lateef in 1967. “I thought that the diagram was linked to another apparently unrelated field of studies – the gravity of the quantum”, he wrote in A Initiate of Business Essay on his discovery“What I had achieved … was that the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein's theory reflected in the Coltrane diagram.”

The theory can “immediately resemble non-testable pop-philosophy”, ” Writes the creators projectwhich highlights the musical collaboration inspired by Alexander's physics with the experimental producer Rioux (sample below). But his ideas are much more substantial, “a convincing interdisciplinary investigation”, published in a book entitled Jazz of physics: the secret link between music and the structure of the universe.

Alexander describes the links between jazz and physics in his Ted speech, as well as in the memory Cable Video higher. “A connection,” he says, is “the mysterious way that quantum particles move. … According to the rules of quantum mechanics”, they will really cross all possible paths “. Alexander says that Alexander is parallel to how jazz musicians improvise, playing with all possible notes on a scale. His own improvisation game, he says, is greatly improved by thinking of physics. And in this, he only follows the giant stages of his two idols.

It turns out that Coltrane himself used Einstein's theoretical physics to light his understanding of the composition of jazz. As Ben Ratliff reports in Coltrane: the story of a soundThe brilliant saxophonist once delivered to the French Cor player David Amram an “incredible discourse on the symmetry of the solar system, speaking of black holes in space, constellations, and the entire structure of the solar system, and how Einstein was able to reduce all this complexity in something very simple.” Said Amram:

Then he explained to me that he was trying to do something like that in music, something that came from natural sources, the traditions of blues and jazz. But there was a completely different way of seeing what was natural in music.

All this may seem rather vague and mysterious, but Alexander assures us that the Coltrane method looks very much like Einstein: “Einstein is famous for what is perhaps its greatest gift: the ability to transcend mathematical limitations with physical intuition. He would improvise using what he called what he called gedankenexperiments (German for thought experiences), which provided him with a mental image of the result of the experiences that no one could carry out. »»

Einstein was also a musician –As we noted previously– Who played the violin and the piano and whose admiration for Mozart inspired his theoretical work. “Einstein used mathematical rigor,” writes Alexandre, as much as he used “creativity and intuition. He was an improviser in the soul, just like his hero, Mozart ”. Alexander has followed suit, seeing in the 1967 “Coltrane Mandala” at the idea that “improvisation is a characteristic of music and physics”. Coltrane “was a musical innovator, with physics at hand” and “Einstein was an innovator in physics, with music at hand”.

Alexander is part of some additional details in his longer Tedx speech above, starting with a personal context on the way he first understood physics as an intuitive discipline closely linked to music. For the real meat of his argument, you will probably want Read his bookMuch appreciated by the physicist winner of the Nobel Leon Cooper, the futuristic composer Brian Eno, and many other shiny minds in music and science.

Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2016.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness