Table of Contents

Introduction 1
1 Music and the Origins of Ancient Science 9
2 The Dream of Oresme 21
3 Moving the Immovable 35
4 Hearing the Irrational 55
5 Kepler and the Song of the Earth 73
6 Descartes's Musical Apprenticeship 89
7 Mersenne's Universal Harmony 103
8 Newton and the Mystery of the Major Sixth 121
9 Euler: The Mathematics of Musical Sadness 133
10 Euler: From Sound to Light 151
11 Young's Musical Optics 161
12 Electric Sounds 181
13 Hearing the Field 195
14 Helmholtz and the Sirens 217
15 Riemann and the Sound of Space 231
16 Turning the Atoms 245
17 Planck's Cosmic Harmonium 255
18 Unheard Harmonies 271
Notes 285
References 311
Sources and Illustration Credits 335
Acknowledgments 337
Index 339

About the Author

Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Abel's Proof- An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; Seeing Double- Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Sky in a Bottle; and Music and the Making of Modern Science, all published by the MIT Press.