Pythagoras' Music of the Spheres

good evening welcome to the Menil collection my name is Carl Killian I'm the director of public programs here and when I asked you guys turnout for cellphones we're here tonight to hear about a work of art called the infinity machine created by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Perez Miller it is a first and an experimental series of year-long site-specific installations and the former byzantine fresco chapel at the manila collection those of you who have visited know that the infinity machine contains 150 whirling mirrors a beautiful light program and a soundtrack recorded in space by nasa these are sights and sounds that relate to a theory of the universe espoused by Pythagoras a sixth century BC Greek philosopher - 9,000 years ago had an idea he called the music of the spheres our speakers tonight are both professors at Rice University one's a classicist one's an astronomer and they'll talk selectively take us through those centuries between Pythagoras and today Scott McGill chairman of the rice classic and classical and European studies department will use the work of other preeminent Greek and Roman writers to help create the world of Pythagoras astronomer Christopher M Johns crow professor in Rice's Department of physics and astronomy will after taking a brief look at the contributions of the 17th century astronomer physicist Johannes Kepler moved the story forward to NASA and the Voyager the infinity machine was created by Tony Tobey camps milk collector Menil collection curator of modern and contemporary art and it's generously supported by the city of Houston Scott McGill received both an MA and a PhD from Yale University he teaches courses in Latin language and literature and Roman culture at rise where he became the chair of the classical European Studies department and 2014 the author of a book on Virgil he's currently working on an edited volume of essays on Late Antiquity and the book on plagiarism in classical literature Christopher John's crawled attended the University of Texas at Austin and was awarded an MA and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley since 2001 he's taught in the department of physics and astronomy and actor scholar his list of publications fills 21 pages of single space typing please help me to welcome Scott McGill and Chris John's hi there I'm Scott McGill I want to thank first of all the Menil for inviting inviting me to speak tonight and Carl in particular now I have to say I'm a classicist by trade Latin and Greek so I'm not used to speaking in front of so many people thank you usually our classes aren't quite this big but I'm excited about it and certainly looking forward to it and looking forward to telling you a bit about Pythagoras the person with whom the idea of the music of the spheres originated so I thought tonight in the time I have I would tell you a bit about him about his biography and then lead you to some ideas about music that originated with him and then talk about the music of the spheres themselves okay and his ideas about them so as Carl said Pythagoras is a 6th century Greek philosopher so he's born probably around 570 BC now I say probably you'll hear the words probably and perhaps quite a bit tonight because there's very little well the evidence for him is not altogether rock-solid okay so we have a lot of sources on him but we have no writings from him okay nothing survives from him there there are some forgeries but nothing from from him himself one of the reasons for this is because it would appear when he taught he taught only orally so you will have sources from antiquity when they're citing Pythagoras will use the Greek Altos FA which means the man himself said right but saying is the important thing they're not the man himself wrote okay so we don't have as I said any first hand primary material from Pythagoras we do have a lot of sources who talk about him and this is because his life fascinated the ancients as I think it fascinates this moves as it fascinates the moderns as well okay so let me move this just a little so this is a bust of Pythagoras in the capital I museum now Pythagoras what fascinates I think the ancient sources about him is his superhuman qualities and his according to the sources kind of quasi divine qualities these characteristics of him are present in the stories surrounding his birth so in the most common story that we hear and this comes from a later biographer named I am blackest don't be kind of embarrassed if you don't know him most classicists don't know him so don't worry he's roughly 245 to 325 AD so he's writing long after pythagoras pythagoras his own life but in this story that Kant came down to iamblichus and pythagoras his father goes to the Oracle at Delphi and the Oracle predicts that his wife will bring forth a son who is supremely beautiful wise and good to mankind okay and then Pythagoras is named after the Pythian Apollo the Pythian Apollo this is the Oracle at Delphi so this is why it has the name Pythagoras but even connected to his birth you have this sense that this is a figure who's somewhat more right than your then your your common common mortal he's born in Samos okay a slide here so circled in red so this is Greece right and it's on the eastern shore of the Aegean okay he leaves Samos at 18 our sources tell us there was a a tyrant fair named Polycrates who in some way the sources tell us she compelled pythagoras to leave the island pythagoras felt that he might receive something to his study the sources are a bit vague about this but under under this tyrant Pythagoras felt the need to leave Samos and he began to travel and his travel during his travels he studied and the first person with whom he studied was failings fail ease is one of the seven wise men of ancient Greece he's known to be the first philosopher in ancient Greece and this is because he tried to explain the world without recourse to mythology he tried to explain natural phenomena naturally not not again not in relation to the gods okay so Pythagoras goes to study with with fail east bay leaves us again when the civilized what wise men of Greece he's he's create original thinker and what does they leaves think about Pythagoras he thinks that my vagus is really special right more special than Phaleas himself that he has a kind of intellect that Phaleas and kind of only imagine having so even with that story we see there to this this precocious Pythagoras right and this Pythagoras who is again something something greater right something kind of again in touch with some higher forces okay so he acquires knowledge with fairly she shows great talent he he and oh if I have a slide on this as well oh this is a bit AutoWorld I'll come back to that in a second so a later poet named Ovid who was a you might have heard of him he is a Roman poet from late 1st century BC early 1st century AD he in his poem the metamorphosis he writes about Pythagoras came book 15 of the metamorphosis it's Pythagoras's vision of how the world works ok and Ovid to introduce Pythagoras he writes this a man lived here a Samian by birth but he had fled from Samos and it's masters and hating tyranny by his own choice became an exile though the gods in heaven lived far removed he approached then in his mind and things that nature kept from mortal sight his inward I explored okay this is the way he's understood right he approached the gods in his mind right things kept from mortal sight he's something more than mortal his inward eye right he's able to see he's able to explore and to to approach as part of his education then he again he studies with Fei Lee's and then he moves to the east he goes to Babylon for a while and he goes to Egypt okay Egypt first actually and then Babylon in both places he learns geometry he learns astronomy and he learns music okay our sources tell us if this is where he acquires his scientific and musical knowledge during during his travels to the east he then goes back to Samos he's 56 years old by this point he is studying Egypt our sources tell us for 22 years and in Babylon for 12 makes his way back back to Samos but then decides to go and I'll go back here to Croton which is in the south of Italy and what was called Matt Magna Grecia because the Greeks had colonized that part of Italy in this period of ancient history he goes there our sources tell us because he claims all philosophers live abroad and demands at home are too great here's the notion again at Samos kind of can't contain him and he he feels that there are learning men in Italy in abundance so he settles here in the south as I said in the south of Italy Magna Grecia when he settles there he forms some kind of community ok another biographer named diogenes laërtius says he forms a brotherhood or a club ok in this club or Brotherhood or school when you can maybe maybe call it there are secret practices some esoteric rites involving science and mathematic and maybe the worship of Apollo as well there's moral instruction in this community there's a strict code of conduct okay it was possibly a school okay but we can't be sure what that would mean some sources tell us that there were teachers and listeners that would certainly imply a school other sources are a little a little less clear about that I think we can say that it's somewhere between a school and a cult okay and a cult not of the negative kind of let's all wear the same sneakers and wait for the mothership kind of cult not not like that thankfully was a cult the word cult in antiquity meant something different it meant a kind of private a private circle of knowledge okay some people had had access to this prior to this kind of knowledge others didn't those who did were in the cult and those who didn't were not okay so I think we can understand what Pythagoras is community using the word cult but understanding it I think differently from from how we do today now certainly to there was a bit of a cult of personality around Pythagoras there's certainly that as well okay and I've got a nice passage here from from iamblichus about how Pythagoras was received in Italy okay and the kind of fanfare that he received so I'll just read this out to you so this great multitude and these are the people who who come to meet Pythagoras when he arrives in Italy this great multitude of people likewise receiving laws and mandates from Pythagoras as so many divine precepts and without which they engaged in no occupation dwelt together with the greatest general Concord celebrated and ranked by their neighbors among the number of the blest at the same time as we have already observed they shared their possessions in common such was such also with their reverence for Pythagoras that they numbered him with the gods as a certain beneficent and filling philanthropic diamond and diamond here just means kind of divine spirit okay if somebody celebrated him as the Pythian Pythian Apollo and but others considered him the hyperborean Apollo another kind of cult manifestation of Apollo but the I but the thing to take away from this right he's he's treated divinely himself okay so here's that way in which Pythagoras occupies the space between men and gods because of his knowledge because of his divine wisdom okay a couple of other things about this school or cult whatever we choose to call it there was probably vegetarianism it practiced vegetarianism in this in this community and Ovid again speaks about this right he was the first to ban as food for men the flesh of living things right abstain preserve your bodies unab used mortals with food of sin how vile Ekron flesh should swallow flesh body should fatten ridi body life should live upon the death of other lives okay so we had a sense right that this was this was an athame to him one reason it was an athlete to him is that he believed in metempsychosis and metempsychosis means the traveling of souls that when you die your soul out lives you and then it comes to occupy another body okay so the transmigration of souls is another way of saying that some of our sources tell us one tells us that pythagoras could remember four lives he had lived another source all this galius romans states that pythagoras remembered being a courtesan right that must been a lively conversation he recounted that and another source still another source tells us that pythagoras they say he heard a cry of a friend in The Barking of a dog okay so he was a dog was his wait a minute that's that's that's that's a friend of mine but his soul had left that friend's body and that now occupied that of a dog now this means of course souls can they can migrate between species meaning that they can come to to to inhabit well pigs and cows and and and things that we eat is meat so therefore if you're if you're a meat eater you're a cannibal in a sense for Pythagoras okay so this is this is behind some of us thinking here okay of course one thing we I think probably all know Pythagoras for it's this the Pythagorean theorem a squared plus B squared equals C squared so put it right the scientist and met what will have to help I'm a humanities person but I think I'm right about this where you put a three at the a 1/4 the B and a 5 at the C then you've got the Pythagorean theorem right so okay so we all know him for this since since antiquity this theorem was credited to to Pythagoras himself another mathematical kind of concept associated with him was the pet track tease this is called this is a triangle with ten right the ten dots they form they each form their own triangles ten was a perfect number for the pythagorean's okay so these these mathematical concepts associated with him now mathematics for Pythagoras they were associated with religion okay and this is because math reflects the principles of the world for Pythagoras so Aristotle in his metaphysics says the pythagorean's thought principles of mathematic mathematics were the principles of all things math for Pythagoras is a there's a mystic sense of truth that math can reveal according to Pythagoras okay these ideas possibly come from Orpheus I'm going to very quickly read you one other section from I am Lucas about this idea so Orpheus amplify says having learnt wisdom from his mother in the mountains he said that the eternal essence of number is the most providential principle of the universe of heaven and earth and the intermediate nature okay and father's far farther still that it is the root of the permanency of divine nature's of gods and diamond this these are the ideas that Pythagoras work with as well okay the the divinity of math what Pythagoras is after is that ever elusive thing and that is the secrets of the universe where he wants to know the secrets of the universe he wants to know these not through recourse again not the requests of the gods for him is the recourse especially through through mathematics especially okay not exclusively but especially okay so this brings us to his ideas about music okay um for him well the story goes that one day he was passing and I have this as a lot of yeah okay right so I have a lot of text here I'm gonna I'll keep this one up here for a while so you can read it while I speak he was passing by a black blacksmith's shop and he heard the sound of the hammers and they were all giving off different different pitches and he wanted to figure out why they were giving off these different sounds okay and he realized that had to do with the ratio of the Hammers the size of the hammers okay so one is 2/3 the size of another one is 1/2 the size of another and this gave me an idea that the difference in musical pitch had to do with mathematical ratios okay so he goes home and he rigs up this contraption and the story goes on here rigs up this contraction with some chords and he puts weight weights on the end of ends of them he discovers that the chord stretched by the greatest weight produced when a produced when compared with that would with the smallest weight produced a sound that's the equivalent of an octave okay and then he had these other chords as well and he realized that again the musical musical interval having to do with these ratios with the frequency of yeah the frequency ratio so he figured he discovered the perfect fifth which my musical students tell me is seven half steps from C to G and the perfect fourth which is C to F okay so but he figures these things out and he figures them out mathematically music is also a very important thing to the pythagorean's there's a sense in which there's there's a there's divine expression in music but it's expressed again because of because of math right math is that the basis of it okay and that's what's that's what's fundamental to the Pythagorean view here okay and then this leads us to the music of the spheres okay and you'll you'll see in this as well you've got this sense again that he's able to understand things that others can he's under he's able to understand ineffable things he's able to fix his intellect on the sublime right okay so this is again all that we've seen so far about Pythagoras also expressed also expressed here the notion of the music of the spheres is that the pitch of notes depends upon the speed of vibrations planets move at different rates of motion and so they must produce a sound and the sound varies according to the rates of motion so you have ratios again here at the you know at the at the basis of it okay so he had a notion that the planets did move it's probable that this idea is not heliocentric okay there's a some sources tell us he had he had a version of heliocentrism but certainly the music of the spheres has earth at the center of things okay but the planets otherwise revolve as they revolve they could they may produce pitches and because of the ways in which these these sounds relate to one another the ratios of them they produce this harmony okay this harmony now I'll just end here he's saying exactly that I move on to a Roman author named Cicero again who might be familiar to some of you in one of his works on on the Republic Day ray Publica he has a section devoted to called the dream of skippy Oh in which the younger Skippy Oh Skippy Liana's discovers the elder Skippy Oh Skippy Oh for conness he has a vision of him from from the afterlife and Skippy where africanus tells give you a mealy honest the younger one about the music of the spheres okay and you can you can read it here what I want to end with here though is is the next slide I hope I've kept this up long enough you'd at least get a sense of it and that is that right that men's ears can't can't hear these things right for you for you you have no duller sense on that adhering but this mighty music produced by the revolution of the whole universe the highest speed cannot be perceived by human ears anymore that you can look straight at the Sun your sense of sight being overpowered by its ravenous ok oh ok that is the end ok nevermind sorry so I thought I had one more ok sorry about that but the idea that Cicero has and this reflects Pythagorean thinking is that this music of the spheres is is more beautiful than we can imagine ok there's a there's a aesthetic quality to this music that is is truly it's truly divine right but it's again it's it's it's produced by these these physical properties the universe must be harmonious in this way of thinking ok and this is because I think there's there's even if it's not with recourse to the gods there's a sense of the divinity in nature the divinity in the universe this must express itself through harmony ok a must express itself through the most beautiful sounds that we can possibly imagine but that we can't hear now according to the ancients Pythagoras could hear them or could at least approach them that at least conceive of them right and this is what what makes Pythagoras the kind of exceptional figure from antiquity and we as we'll hear next his ideas anticipate in some ways modern science and are at least partly true and from from classical antiquity that's kind of all we can hope for I think so when in terms of being confirmed by by modern science so thank you I'm going to hand the floor over now to Chris okay well thank you very much and I also want to extend my thanks to the Menil and to Carl and particular for arranging this and so I'm going to take off not quite where Scott left we're gonna skip a couple thousand years and get to a point where sort of ancient mysticism starts to to meet modern science and that person really is embodied by Johannes Kepler and shown here you know is his portrait on the left and in the top right is a diagram that's supposed to be reminiscent of sort of a Greek understanding of this music of the spheres and in the bottom right is a model of the universe that Kepler first came up where he was adopting many of the things that that Scott just left us with but first let's find out a little bit about Kepler himself and I picture him up there in the top next to Tycho Brahe Hey because bra hey was a particularly important person in Kepler's life and also for the history of astronomy but Kepler himself was born in 1571 died in 1630 Kepler was a mathematician Union by all accounts he was one of the most exceptional mathematicians alive of his time and so he shared this love of Malthus love of numbers and a sense that there was the divine in numbers with the Thakur's he studied mathematics at the University and Tubingen and then assumed a professorship of math and Graz and Austria at age 22 but he was still somewhat of a mystic now he was an astrologer at the time kind of like now for scientists a lot of our funding depends on the government and the government at that time was not fully reliable and paying him his sow or at least all of his salary but he found that he could cast horoscopes for people and supplement his income and was fairly successful at that and in some ways he was probably a more famous astrologer in his day than he was a scientist at least initially he then went to work for Tycho in Prague in the year 1600 and shown on the bottom right here is a diagram of an observatory that Tycho had built with funds from the King of Denmark and and what this allowed for Kepler was the best observational data that anybody had ever obtained in the history of the world up to this time in order to understand how the planets move you need to know exactly where they are at a given time and it's a little challenging to make precise measurements with just your naked eye telescopes had not been invented yet Tycho made very large instruments instruments to measure angles locations and so forth and he had an extremely large volume of the most accurate measurements of the positions of the planets that were known at that time and Kepler thought that if he could examine that data he would be able to study the true motions of the planets and there was a problem at that time it was known it was becoming known that the model that was handed down from antiquity what we refer to as the the geocentric or Ptolemaic model was very complicated it had circles on top of circles the circle was the perfect shape the perfect geometric shape so it was assumed that the planets moved in circular paths and it didn't do such a good job of predicting exactly where the planets were at a given time and in general and and it also didn't provide any kind of a natural explanation for why some planets like Mercury and Venus can only be CERN seeing some certain distance from the Sun whereas other planets can be seen completely on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun and so Copernicus had introduced his heliocentric model and there was very active debate at the time as to which of these was correct and the way you could figure it out was to get good data and Tycho had that data so Kepler published several books the Mysterium cosmic graphical um I don't speak Latin so the mysteries of the cosmos in 1597 and that didn't have any of his of his famous science in it but it was a connection to the past and a connection to Pythagoras he developed his what is now called his first law of planetary motion in 1605 his second law and 1602 and published those in the new astronomy in 1609 and he didn't develop his third law until much later in 1618 he had a number of personal and political difficulties so Kepler was a fairly devout Lutheran but he didn't actually follow all the precepts of the Lutheran Church and so sometimes the local Lutheran priests didn't think he was Lutheran enough and he wouldn't get communion from the Lutheran priest and then where he was living every now and then was taken over by a new ruler who was Catholic and he had to move because he was a Lutheran so he didn't manage to really fit completely in with any of the religious forces that were at play in his in his particular world and then in 1619 published the harmonies of this of the world in sick and he had his laws of planetary motion there but he also had a lot about the music to the spheres which is one of the reasons that I'm connecting them here and then in 1618 1620 and 1621 he published and much more readable basically for the masses type of writing his thoughts on why the Copernican model of the of the universe was correct and that's really kind of what started to spread it more throughout Europe okay so the first book that he published Kepler was trying to see how you could explain the ordering of the planets through some very simple pure mathematics like Pythagoras for for Kepler math was divine and the universe should reflect divinity and so simple mathematical forms would be examples of that divinity and so what he believed now he peace he fully believed in the Copernican model so he had the Sun at the center but there were at his time there were six known planets if you include the earth as a planet and passed down from antiquity there were five perfect geometrical solids so as a cube a tetrahedron a dodecahedron and some a 12 sided object a 20 sided object and so what he tried to figure out is could you nest one solid inside of another so that the inner solid was just touching the edges of the next solid and then the sphere that would wrap around the corners of each of those solids would represent where the planets world and and that was the way he tried to order the positions of the planets in the universe however this really didn't explain the motions of them very well and it wasn't until he got ahold of Tycho's data that he could really start to work this out now Tycho by all accounts was a bit jealous of Kepler he knew that Kepler was much more intelligent at least mathematically much more skilled mathematically and so he there was this sort of tension there and apparently when Kepler first went to work for bra hey I he was he inadvertently insulted bra hey and a couple of his other assistants imagine that a scientists mathematician who socially awkward I've never never met one myself so it took a while for Kepler to actually get a hold of bra haze data but once he did in fact if the first data he got was just on the planet Mars and so he worked out Mars is orbit now again Kepler is working in a world passed down from the Greeks basically of this divine idea that that math and geometry reflect can reflect the divine that the heavens should be defined and that the circle is the most perfect form so Kepler tried his best to make the orbit of Mars fit a circle he tried taking the circle and offsetting it a little bit from the Sun so he didn't think the Sun had to be exactly at the center but the planets had to be moving in a circle and that that still didn't work he finally hit on the idea of an ellipse and that is that is his first a lot what he's very famous for that the planets move around the Sun in elliptical paths with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse his second law is that the area that the area's swept out by a line connecting to the planet yeah that that planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times and from that you derived that the planets move much close much faster when they are closer to the Sun and they move much more slowly when they are further from the Sun and the that is the having the orbit be elliptical not being perfectly circular it means that it's an eccentric orbit the greater the eccentricity the more drawn-out the longer that ellipse is and then later he developed his third law which was a mathematical relationship between the periods and the average distances of the planets from the Sun and in particular he found that there was this harmonic for resonant relationships between the orbital speeds of a given planet now again Kepler studied music music was one of the four main topics that that was studied at this time when Kepler was alive and so he was very familiar with music and as Scott mentioned when things move they make sounds it was expected that the planet should make some sort of sound some sort of music perhaps when they moved around the Sun and many people had tried to when when the Copernican model first came on had tried to work out the various sounds that the planets would do and put them into some relationship to their position mercury moves around the Sun in the fastest so it should maybe have the highest pitch sound Jupiter was a Jupiter and Saturn were the most distant known planets they move around the Sun much more slowly so they should have perhaps the lowest sound but nobody could work out the relative distances to the planets and a sensible musical theme but what Kepler realized is if you actually look at the speed you don't look at the spacing of the planets but if you look at the speeds that they're moving what he found is the ratio of the speed that Saturn for example moves when it's closest to Sun the when its furthest from the Sun forms a ratio of four to five which is a major third in music and so he does believe that this was evidence that God had proclaimed that Saturn should be moving and making music within a major third and so Kepler wrote music for the motions of the planets because mercury is the most eccentric it has the greatest difference between the closest speed and the further speed it spans the greatest size on the scale Venus's orbit is almost perfectly circular so it doesn't have any variation on the scale it stays the same note the whole time that it's moving and the other planets fall in where they are now he did say okay Jupiter and Saturn are the farthest from the Sun so they are the lowest notes because they're moving around more slowly and mercury goes up to the highest notes because it is moving so fast so now we fast forward to Voyager to connect some of these ideas than to oh let me say one other thing about Kepler Kepler actually tried to have people play this music and it didn't sound really good it didn't sound very harmonious at all so and and he spent there are records of his writing he spent pages and pages and pages trying to work out a musical system for the planets that would sound good and he couldn't do it so any reason that it just made no sense for God to make music in the spheres that nobody could hear and that wouldn't be harmonious to anybody now other people had suggested that if the planets are worlds like the earth then they may be inhabited as well and in fact Kepler believed that the Sun was inhabited that there were fiery beams on the Sun and if you were going to make music from the planets moving around the Sun perhaps the beings that could hear that music in a harmonious fashion were the ones at the center of all that so he thought that perhaps this music sounded beautiful to the fiery beings that lived on the Sun so now we fast forward to Voyager to connect to the exhibit that's here at the Menil so Voyager was a fantastic thing for me I was not quite a teenager when Voyager was launched and it truly galvanized my interest in astronomy and is probably you know one of the reasons why I do what I do for my career it was launched in 1977 there were two satellites that were launched and its mission was to visit their mission were to visit the outer planets the gas giant planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune and and their moons they carried with them music of the earth there were golden records on each of the satellites they were not the first satellites to have these records pioneer 10 also carried a record as well both of these satellites are still functioning Voyager 1 is about 12 billion miles from the earth and Voyager 2 is about 10 billion miles from here Voyager 1 has passed into interstellar space that has left the influence of the Sun it has left the influence of the solar system and it's now truly in the space between the stars and Voyager 2 is almost there it's not not quite there but it's will soon pass out of the solar system completely so each of the satellites carried these golden records this is just a a small listing of the songs that were on Voyager on the Voyager records and it's not just songs there are greetings from in many different languages there are natural sounds sound of the wind sounds in the forest there's whale sounds there's many many things that were put on these records but some of it was music carried out into the cosmos so what about the music that you hear when you see the exhibit of the infinity machine or if you were seeing the what was playing and listening to it before we started the music that you're hearing there the sounds that you're hearing there are not exactly sounds like we would think of sounds for us sound waves are waves of pressure that travel through the air in in the room in the on the earth there is some in that so that and that pressure depends on the particles in the in the air colliding with one another and causing those pressure waves to move out there are particles in the space around the planets mainly hydrogen it's coming from the Sun there's a solar wind that's blowing out from the Sun that very outer outer layers of the Sun are so hot about a million degrees that the very tenuous outer layers of Sun are flowing away at speeds approaching a thousand kilometers per second it's not very dense and the pressure from that is just not high enough to create sound waves as we understand them but because it's so hot the hydrogen that's moving out from the Sun is not atoms of hydrogen but it's ions of hydrogen it's separate protons and electrons so they are charged particles and when charged particles move they create magnetic fields and so there are there are magnetic fields from the Sun streaming out into interplanetary space and the planets including the outer planets their own magnetic field as does the earth and the magnetic field of the planets sort of excludes the magnetic field from the Sun but it's not just a constant still thing the stuff that's flowing out from the Sun some of it sometimes it's higher density sometimes it's lower density sometimes it's moving a little bit faster sometimes it's moving a little bit slower and so it's banging into the magnetic fields of the planets and the magnetic fields are shaking in response and in one of the things that we see as a consequence of this whole process between the Sun and the earth is the Northern Lights shown up in the in the top right the northern and sunder lights the aurora is created by charged particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field that get energized by the solar wind again it energized by the particles coming from the Sun and the our planets have aurora exactly the same way shown in the picture on the bottom left and as jupiter on the bottom right is Saturn these are from satellites not Voyager different satellites that were sent by NASA to these planets but the bright bluish white thing rings that you see around the poles of those two planets are the Aurora happening on Jupiter and Saturn from exactly the same process that's happening on the earth and this is evidence of this basically the Sun banging on the magnetic fields of the earth and the other planets and what Voyager detected was those those oscillations of the magnetic fields and those oscillations are in a frequency that's exactly the same as what we hear the frequencies of sound that we hear on the earth and so if you just translate those frequencies and then the amplitudes of that into pressure waves on the earth you hear it as sound and that is the sound that you're hearing when you visit the infinity machine and we are actually listening for related sounds now from planets around other stars so shown in the upper right is an image of a relatively nearby star the star itself is in the center and the telescope that was used had a coronagraph basically in a coping disk placed over the star so that it's not so terribly bright so that you can actually see the planets around it there are four planets that have been detected around this particular star they are all very massive jupiter-like planets the lowest mass one is about five times the mass of Jupiter the highest mass one is about 10 times the mass of Jupiter so these are giant planets but we think they should have all the same processes that jupiter has they should have magnetic fields and their stars should be sending out any something like the solar wind these planets because we can actually see them happen to be very pretty far from their star but we know of other stars that have jupiter-like planets that are very close to their star where the interaction between the winds and the magnetosphere could be very strong and for example The Very Large Array that radio dishes shown in the bottom in New Mexico have the possibility of detecting this interaction between the Stars and the planets it's actually not quite ready they're putting some new electronics in those telescopes that will be ready in about six months and one of my colleagues at Rice and I hope to propose actually trying to tech the radio missions from this process in planets around other stars now going back to resonances and this was part of what appealed to Kepler so much there are also mentioned earlier there are gravitational resonances when when we think of resonances in orbits and in gravitational interactions if it happens to be that the orbit of an inner planet or moon what is shown here is for the moons of Jupiter the four main or three of the main moons of Jupiter if the inner planet if its orbital period is exactly twice as fast sorry as the as the next planet then when the when the next one makes one orbit the inner one makes two and the point is that they line up in the same place every few orbits depending on exactly what the the resonance is and so they can interact more strongly with each other gravitationally and that can perturb things in in their orbits and we see very clear examples of that in the solar system shown here on the on the x-axis on the bottom axis is distance from the Sun the units are astronomical units those are the Earth's Sun distance so in the where it says 2.5 that is 2.5 times the distance from the Sun that the earth is and in this region of the solar system there are asteroids there's the asteroid belt there's lots of little rocks out there and shown in the blue lines are resonances with Jupiter so that inner one at about 2.5 anything there goes around three times when Jupiter goes around once now Jupiter is really big the asteroids are really small and when their gravity gravitational interaction gets magnified by this resonant process those asteroids get flung out of out of those orbits and that's why you see very few asteroids at these resonant positions is because Jupiter can easily get rid of them but the point here is that resonance can shape and is shaping what we see in our solar system actually when we were looking at the picture of Saturn you may have noticed a gap in its rings that's another example of this where one of the moons of Saturn is flinging things in the ring out at that position creating that gap we also see examples of resonances where things can be captured and this is kind of a complicated diagram but the main thing that I wanted to show if you can see over towards the left there's a big circle for Pluto and there's a bunch of other little circles there each of those is a Pluto like object in the outer solar system it's a small body that could become a comet if it came into the inner solar system and there's several of them that happen to be at this particular resonance I its the resonance of two to three I think I'm reading it correctly with Neptune Neptune has captured Pluto into one of these resonance orbits and it's captured a number of other party number of other comet-like things Pluto like things into these residents so the bottom line is that resonances which sound beautiful and music are actually playing a role in the dynamics of our own solar system in addition to our solar system we have discovered many stars in fact many planets around other stars the the satellite that has done the best job of that was named after Kepler and all it did was stare at about a hundred and sixty thousand stars and when US planet happens to pass in front of it if a planet happens to pass in front of it that star gets a little bit dimmer while the planet is in front of it and then it gets bright again and in this way the Kepler satellite has discovered about four thousand planets around other stars and in some of those stars there's more than one planet it's a solar system like our solar system and we see examples of the periods of those planets in those solar systems interacting in a resonant way shaping the structure of those solar systems so these resonances are important throughout the cosmos it seems there's other sounds sound like things in the universe as well shown in the top right is a movie of the SIRT of the surface of the Sun and these this modeling that's kind of moving around is hot and cold gas rising and falling in the Sun the lighter parts are the hot gas rising the darker parts are the cold gas falling but that motion is acting like a hammer hitting the Sun and just like Scott mentioned the Hammers striking the things that the iron that Pythagoras heard and it made him work out his theory of music these hammers that are hitting the Sun are making the Sun ring it is vibrating unfortunately the frequency that it's vibrating that is much less than one Hertz so we would not be able to hear it if you translated that to a sound wave we wouldn't be able to hear it but there's also other places in the universe where we see pressure waves and again sound is just pressure pressure waves moving out there's a galaxy on the left here that has a black hole that is spinning and it is sending pressure waves through the gas around it and if you it's now the pressure waves are very very very low frequency the New York Times article advertised it as the lowest note in the universe it's about 57 octaves below middle C really low we couldn't hear it either so then moving on to the Infinity machine we've talked about the sound but for me when I saw it it was the mirrors that appealed to me the most because I'm an astronomer I'm an astronomer that uses telescopes mirrors are the heart of telescopes of optical and infrared telescopes all the telescopes I use the heart of that is a mirror so I was fascinated by the mirrors the infinity machine has two mirrors right at the center facing each other giving you an infinite series of reflections kind of shown in the example of the picture in the top right and I take it that's that's kind of where it gets its name I was hoping that there would be a telescope mirror somewhere in the infinity machine apparently there isn't but that's my own personal bias but for me the telescopes allow us to stretch our vision in our imagination almost to infinity to the edge of the universe it's not quite infinitely far away but it's quite quite far away 13.8 billion light years so I was I was fascinated by the infinity machine didn't quite see the mirror I was looking for and I'll leave you with that so I think at this point we're supposed to field any questions that that the audience might have beautiful and I personally think and I think many people would agree that the sounds that we hear in the infinity machine that the solar winds hitting the magnetic spheres of the different moons and planets in our solar system are beautiful can you account from that from either of your disciplines or do you think that's just a kind of coincidence so so I haven't actually played the music the Kepler wrote I you know if you played each one individually it might actually be pretty harmonious it was putting them all together and all the planets are moving simultaneously so Kepler imagine that you had to play them all together and he couldn't make that harmonious and so if you put all the music in the infinity machine together at the same time I don't know what it would sound like but it may not sound harmonious we should try it given that the planets are not the orbits are not circular but they're elliptical what kind of a phase effect you think there would be as they kind of change in the relationship within one planet or within each other so that's that's part of that those resonant interactions from the gravitational thing because if they become eccentric if they are in a resonance with another planet and we see this in the extrasolar planets the interaction makes them more eccentric and if they get more eccentric that kind of reinforces their interactions and in some cases it can cause one of them to be flung out usually it's the lower mass one so the high mass one is the big bully he gets to stick around and be a little guy gets shot out somewhere sometimes they get shot out sometimes it gets shot in towards its star and gets destroyed so what is that what does that do to the actual sounds from translating the magnetic when to the auditory representation so the closer you are to the star the bigger the interaction is so that would probably make the sounds louder and kind of changing in frequency more rapidly so maybe that's the death scream of the planet as it gets flung into its star it's always seems something of an interesting coincidence that the human language we call mathematics correlate so well with the physical world and I've often wondered if there is a philosophy or some sort of in-depth understanding as to why that correlation came about I I myself study poetry so it's difficult for me to answer that myself but certainly this was the this was exactly the the question I think that Pythagoras was was hoping to answer and I think it's a kind of eternal human question right why why why does math work so well in explaining a lot of these things so and I think you know for for for Pythagoras to get at that understanding was to get again the understanding of all things now for me what they're always interesting again as a humanist is the search itself and and the impulse itself that that that drove Pythagoras and others you know 2500 years ago and continues to write so so see I have no no answer for that but I'm certainly uh I certainly feel that that your question is exactly the motivation that that Pythagoras had right so it's it's speaking along the same the same terms so the same live other and so each of you might have a different response to this but what is so divine about spheres and circles that's something that I've always wondered so I it's my understanding as as the tradition was passed down from from the ancients that the fact that the circle has no beginning or end is is kind of what makes it perfect in some sense and and so that's probably my best yes I'm I'm more partial to the trapezoid myself I think there's some in the back over here just a simple question for a science update are we still receiving signals from Voyager 1 and 2 yes we're still receiving information back from them there are a number of questions about exactly how the the solar wind interacts with the gas between the stars the interstellar medium and so we are still receiving data from them we don't receive data on a daily basis because it's it's hard to see those signals and the radio telescopes that are capable doing that have to communicate with a bunch of other satellites as well so it's it's not a daily update but we do get information back from them yes we we heard about Pythagoras that could see what the gods saw and had this kind of inner vision and and seeing the the almani and the planets that brings us to the to the physical laws I could not avoid thinking about Bohr's atom right what the allowed orbits for the electron are the ones that are in resonance with the wavelength of the electron itself being a particle and a wave what what is your take about this ability of certain people on the Greek tradition that somehow are able to make this kind of insights that brings us to the very modern and recent science it's it's certainly remarkable and I think it was remarkable for the ancients as well and that's why Pythagoras was was understood as he was and treated as he was right that um but he did in fact have this unusual almost second sight right and there are others as well Archimedes is a good example of this I think from from the Greek world so you know how the the the instincts were so right right I met that's what's so interesting and again how how they were to arrive at the ancients themselves couldn't could explain it and that's why they have recourse to well when you know when his father went to the to the to Delphi he was told that in fact you can have this exceptional son so they they they had to explain it they had to kind of mystify it so so for them to it was it was extraordinary and difficult to account for with a different composition or quality or density of atmosphere on a different planet with the music sound different if we were listening to it on Venus almost certainly it would and so in that sense you know Kepler was correct that the music would probably sound different on the different planets now not all of them have atmospheres that would would translate that and the Sun has no surface so you have to pick exactly where you want to sit in the Sun and I don't recommend doing that but so yes there would be different the sound would be perceived differently on the different planets I'd like to find the planet where it sounds like the star wars-themed hi given pyth irises fascination with ratios what was his interest if any in the golden ratio that's found in nature if you can speak to that you know what I I don't know to be honest I love I would have to look that up but if I can certainly do so if you want to stay afterward and give me your your email address and I could I could let you know I thought that I read something in the article about it there this talk that there was gonna be discussion of 440 the concert a the major tone that we use for tuning their instruments and I'm wondering if you could speak to that I don't know about that they didn't tell us hi um my question might be something I should have googled first but this is an easier way to get an answer I know that you're working on studying the magnetic fields and like how they interact with various planets I was wondering how do the solar winds actually travel through a vacuum and is the magnetic field like just around a planet to a certain extent or extent or does it like permeate through space so wind is an analogy term it's not exactly you know when blowing in the way we think that the winds on the earth it is what what is happening is the outer layers of the Sun are heated to very high temperatures we don't actually fully understand how that happens we are pretty certain it has something to do with the sun's magnetic field but what we do know is that there is this Corona surrounding the outer the Sun that's about one and a half to two million degrees and what we perceive as temperature is random motion of particles in a gas they're moving at some speed and so at that very high temperature some of those particles are moving faster than the escape velocity of the Sun so the ones that are moving that fast that happen to be directed away from the Sun escape they just are moving out and they keep going because the Sun's gravity is not strong enough to hold them back and because they are charged because they are individual protons and electrons any moving charge creates a magnetic field and it and that field goes along with the motion of the particle so as the particles move away from the Sun they are carrying the magnetic field with them how does the magnetic field of a planet or a moon come about so in Earth for example the core the earth is molten it's warm and so there are ionized atoms there there's free charges it's protons and electrons there and because the earth is spinning those particles those charged particles are moving more or less in a circular and particles that move on us sir charges that move in a circle create that classical dipole magnetic field that we saw in the pictures I think we can take one more question hi I was reading a few thinks about trying to grasp things like a general relativity in quantum mechanics and it thinks about I don't know I feel like science started exploring the world that we know through the senses which seems to be physical material but it seems to be you can't become introduced into something more abstract that can't really grasp with my but my like hands my senses but I don't know this is dissimilar to what Pythagoras was trying to figure out I guess the world that modern scientists understand it seems to be come more abstract well I would say I would say on in one way it was less abstract right because he and other early philosophers and Pythagoras as an early philosophers of 6th century is is is that the period of the of when philosophy originates and we understand philosophy again is trying to understand especially the natural world without recourse to the gods right so in that way you're actually are trying to demystify things right philosophy is also interested very much in ethics in in human relationships and and social organizations but that's that's a separate branch of it for what we're talking about now so in that way I think it's you know more concrete or at least you know more yeah less less less mysterious at least right but then within that because obviously there was not nearly the kind of understanding of how things work and the kinds of instruments that we have today the concrete knowledge he's trying to get at he's trying to get at it through mathematical theory right so so I think it's it's it's kind of somewhere between the two whereas theoretical in in in the math but nonetheless just the very move that revolutionary move from ascribing things to to divinity - trying to understand them on their own terms that's of course a move away from the abstract so yes that I think it's it shares that reliance on math now exactly why math works so well to describe nature is is I think the question that's really kind of hard to answer it does you mention quantum mechanics and so you know that's that's developed out of very straightforward somewhat hard to do but sensible mathematics and it makes predictions that we have to be able to observe and we may and we do make those observations what is fascinating and and I think very very hard to sometimes grasp is those theories have told us that at a very small level the level of the atom that was mentioned earlier things in nature become fuzzy there are no longer hard things it nature becomes very very fuzzy but that just seems to be the way nature is thank you so much

Channel: The Menil Collection

Views: 72,602

Keywords: Pythagoras (Astronomer), Menil Collection (Museum), Janet Cardiff (Musical Artist), Space (Quotation Subject)

Id: wnyNovUoLSY

Length: 74min 41sec (4481 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2015