The Jazz of Physics Quotes

“Perhaps the answers to these questions require fundamental advances at the interface of physics, the arts, and neuroscience. The deep links between musical form and physical form may be unveiled by understanding how both kinds of knowledge-music and physics-arise together in human brains and nowhere else. After all, brains, regardless of how mysterious they are, are the most complex structures in the universe.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In other words, if an observer looks at another frame of reference (like a moving train), he or she will still see that the speed of light is the same even though that frame of reference is moving relative to it. It is because of this symmetry that our standard theory of light, or electromagnetism, cannot accommodate a varying speed of light in empty space. But when a wave of light moves in a different medium, such as glass, Lorentz symmetry is no longer preserved, and light can change speed relative to empty space. This was the essence of Joao's contention. It could be that there is a quantum effect on space-time that fundamentally violates Einstein's cherished Lorentz symmetry, resulting in a variation of the speed of light in the early universe. As it turns out, the shape of extra dimensions in string theory can indeed cause certain constants, including the speed of light, to vary throughout the space-time fabric.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“you want to be a great musician, you need to know three things. First, you must master the rules before trying to break them. Second, music is about tension and resolve. Third, practice, practice, practice, but when you’re out playing, forget it all.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Interstellar”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“It is amusing to speculate that the reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe. If our cosmic origins are seated in sound patterns, is it too far-fetched to think that music viscerally enables us to tap into those origins?”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“The symmetry of musical compositions mirrors the symmetry that exists in quantum fields, and the breaking of these symmetries in both cases lends beautiful complexity. In physics we get the distinct forces of nature with symmetry breaking, in music we get tension and resolve.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Cosmic inflation generically produces a gravitational wave because the inflaton field, like a stone on a pond, disturbs the space-time fabric.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Leon enjoyed working on interesting and seemingly insurmountable problems, regardless of the subdiscipline. He would fearlessly tackle the most difficult issues or even correct long-held misconceptions and paradigms in other fields such as radiation physiology, neuroscience, and philosophy. During the time I spent working in the Cooper group, Leon was working in the field of neuroscience. And so it was that I began life as a graduate student in physics studying the brain. Who would have thought computational neuroscience would turn me into a cosmologist?”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“What, then, sets human brains apart? 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?”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“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.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Therefore the mandala is a stunning geometric creation by Coltrane that relates these important and general scales to each other, the same way space-time transformation relates length contraction to time dilation, electric fields to magnetic fields.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“We can think of the interactions of fields obeying similar four-dimensional equations that restrict them to live on a four-dimensional light cone. Other interactions that don't live on the light cone are not allowed.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In three dimensions where the invariance of the speed of light is not readily manifest, the Maxwell equations are pieces (shadows) of a four-dimensional object with manifest invariance of the speed of light. This is like the shadow of an upright bicycle wheel cast on the ground, which can look like a line-the circular symmetry is no longer manifest.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“However in 1934, Richard Tolman pointed out an inconsistency with the cyclic model due to the second law of thermodynamics-that entropy will always increase as time progresses. As the universe goes from cycle to cycle, the entropy will increase and the cycles will get longer. Extrapolating back, the cycles shorten, leading to a big bang singularity-no eternal cycles. It's back to the drawing board.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In order to get a cyclic universe, the contracting past universe has to emerge into an expanding universe. Cosmologists call this phenomenon a cosmic bounce. Think of dropping a ball. For the ball to change direction, it has to hit the ground, decelerate, come to a stop, and change its downward velocity. This happens naturally due to momentum conservation and the elasticity of the ball. Similarly the "speed" of the decelerating universe will come to a halt and bounce into an expanding state after reaching a vanishing speed. In order for this to happen, we need a field that makes space-time like an "elastic" ball; called a ghost field, this field is an infinite reservoir of negative energy. Physicists do not like ghost fields because they can quantum mechanically transform to an infinite amount of light energy spontaneously. This happens because, according to an exchange Feynman diagram, the photon, the lightest particle in nature, can steal negative energy from the ghost field to create an explosive amount of photons. We don't see such explosive signatures of ghost fields today, so if cyclic universes are for realand do depend on ghost fields, then the ghost fields have figured out a clever way to not decay into photons. Nina Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Studies and his colleagues proposed one way this could happen: the ghost field condenses, which bounds the negative energy to a finite value, preventing further decay into photons.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Much like inflation, the cyclic universe has its strengths and challenges, and so it is still under active research in cosmology. One of the main challenges of the cyclic universe concerns the existence of a menacing field called a ghost.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Tell a child that the first stars and galaxies in the universe were created by sound in the primeval plasma, just after the birth of our universe, and that those in turn created galaxies with complex patterns and stars that sing with particular resonant frequencies. And tell them that there is much more to the universe than this. All analogies break down. But as Leon Cooper taught me, a powerful analogy can say something new that you otherwise would not have known by the theory on its own. Teach children these analogies, and they will push the boundaries later on.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“The uncertainty of being able to know both where a particle is and where it is going beautifully mirrors jazz improvisation. And isn't it mind blowing that the spectrum of vibrations that were amplified by inflation, those that led to the structure in our universe today, is the same as the spectrum of noise? Fundamental to it all is the Fourier addition of waves. The harnonic structure of the cosmic microwave background emerges from quantum noise, just as distinct beats and rhythms emerge from a fundamental waveform, an oscillation, a uniform repetition, a circle.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Music and sound have persisted, whether we have focused on them or not. They are part and parcel with the universe. The symmetry of musical composition mirrors the symmetry that exists in quantum fields, and the breaking of these symmetries in both cases lends beautiful complexity. In physics we get the distinct forces of nature with symmetry breaking, in music we get tension and resolve.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“What if the preinflationary universe was filled with light radiation; perhaps this energy could make space inflate.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In a nutshell, I was able to come up with the first model of inflation based on the annihilation of D-branes.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“What's even more breathtaking is that all electron-those in your body, those in stars, and those distributed across the universe-arise as vibrations from one universal electron field that permeates the vacuum. So if this picture is true, then why isn't the universe completely filled with electrons, photons, and other particles everywhere? Well, one immediate surprise is that the universe can be filled with fields but be absent of particles. Something has to trigger all that potential energy in the fields to become particles, just like a push can make a ball roll down a hill to accumulate kinetic energy.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“One of the mysteries in cosmology is that magnetic fields even exist across galactic distances, and we still don't know how and why.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“The time energy uncertainty says that the smaller the time interval a quantum process occurs, the wider the range of energies the quantum system can access and vice versa.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In de Broglie's hypothesis, every "orbit" of the electron is a wave corresponding to a pure tone. Matter and waves are one and the same. Neils Bohr called this idea-that quantum matter can have both wave-like and particle-like properties-complementarity.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“What the uncertainty principle really reflects is the fact that a quantum entity is neither a wave nor a particle but contains both attributes at the same time. The essence of this principle is the Fourier idea. One can create a wave pulse from adding a handful of pure waves of definite frequencies. Similarly, the particle-like property (a pulse) can emerge from the wave-like property and vice versa.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“A good way to understand the uncertainty principle is to consider a wave where we have complete certainty in its frequency, like a pure tone. Now, I ask you, where is the wave? The wave with its many periodic oscillations is distributed across a very large distance, meaning that a wave of definite frequency will have an arbitrary position. Now let's consider a traveling wave pulse, which only exists for a short duration of time, like a beat. I can localize where the pulse is, but its frequency is not well defined because its frequency is not well defined because a frequency requires many repeating cycles, and a pulse does not have enough width to define a definite frequency. This is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: it says that the more you can know about the position, the less you can know about its frequency, and vice versa. But we just learned that the frequency is proportional to the momentum, so the more one knows about the momentum of a particle, the less one knows about its position, and vice versa.

This is incredibly profound. When scientists want to understand nature, they use instruments to probe and measure it. What the uncertainty principle tells us is that no matter how careful we are, no matter how precise our instrumentation, we can never pin down both the particle-like and the wave-like properties of a quantum entity, whether it be a photon or an electron, a quark or a neutrino. The uncertainty principle is a statement that is fundamental to nature, to the universe, whether we are there to measure it or not.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Planck's constant sets the scale for the wave-like nature of particles. It is a tiny number, which means that we don't see the waviness of macroscopic matter because we are moving slowly compared to the fast quantum particles zipping around the atom. If we were very tiny, we would see our inner waviness. De Broglie's connection between the wavelength of a particle and its momentum is at the heart of the famous uncertainty principle. And it was Werner Heisenberg that was able to precisely formulate it.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“In the above equation, p is the momentum of the electron as it moves around the center of the nucleus and is the wavelength. It is amazing that this equation is a physical reality, for it states that an electron's "orbital" wavelength, a wave-like property, is related to how fast it is going around the nucleus, its momentum. The larger the wavelength, the slower and lighter the particle-recall that momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of a particle.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Waveforms from the early universe formed stars. Stars, in their tumultuous fusion of elements, roduce sounds like tones. They organize themselves into larger structures, such as binary systems or clusters-the equivalent of "musical" phrases. What's more, the millions of stars within galaxies organize themselves into self-similar, fractal structures, like the fractal structure found in Bach's and Ligetti' compositions. I was amazed at the degree to which the organization of cosmic structure mimicked music structure. When an analogy goes beyond your expectations, you can't help but wonder if the analogy is the truth.”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe