Skip to main content

Quantum Mechanics and Avant-Garde Music - Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin ****

This is a fascinating and unique book about the parallel development of, and occasional interactions between, modern physics and contemporary classical music. It’s also a far easier and more enjoyable read than its narrowly academic-sounding title might suggest. If it had been called ‘Music and Quantum Physics’ then I suspect far more people would be motivated to check it out – and, for the most part, I think they’d get exactly what they were looking for.

I deliberately moved the word ‘music’ to the front of my version of the title, because that’s what the book is primarily about – with physics being a background thread, rather than vice versa. Equally, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin is essentially a professional musician with a sideline in the history and philosophy of science – a far less common combination than the other way around. He also seems to have been something of a musical prodigy, mentioning physics-inspired compositions that he wrote as far back as 2013, when he was just 14 years old. Originally from Kazakhstan, he was at least partly educated in Britain, where he seems to have rubbed shoulders with numerous scientific luminaries as well as musical ones. Among the famous people he recounts conversations with are David Deutsch, Ian Stewart, Brian Josephson, David Politzer and Tony Leggett – the last three all being Nobel prize-winners. 

Unlike some of his predecessors (Stockhausen comes to mind here) Abdyssagin doesn’t make any grandiose claims about the equivalence of musical composition and scientific discovery. Instead he focuses on thought-provoking analogies between the two – ‘poetic, figurative, imaginary, metaphoric and artistic correlations’, as he puts it. Examples range from the fairly obvious – such as comparing probabilistic quantum states with the use of probability functions by composers like Iannis Xenakis and John Cage – to the more exotic, such as likening modern multiphonic playing techniques (e.g. simulating chords on otherwise monophonic wind instruments) to quantum entanglement.

While there are numerous cases of composers being influenced by ideas from science and mathematics – Milton Babbitt’s appropriation of set theory to musical ends being another good example – direct influence in the opposite direction is much less common. One striking instance that I was unaware of till I read this book dates all the way back to the 18th century and Leonard Euler. As I’ve just confirmed from Wikipedia, ‘Euler established the application of binary logarithms to music theory, long before their applications in information theory and computer science became known’.

As far as quantum physics is concerned, music’s main impact on it simply lies in the fact that many of its pioneers were great music lovers. The man who invented the very concept of quanta, Max Planck himself, was a gifted pianist, organist and cellist, who even wrote his own compositions from time to time. Einstein, who made important contributions to quantum physics as well as his own theory of relativity, was an amateur violinist (a ‘relatively’ good one, according to a professional whose opinion he sought). But the musical physicist that Abdyssagin spends most time on – two whole chapters – is Werner Heisenberg of uncertainty principle fame. The author describes visits to two of Heisenberg’s offspring, where he learns about the various musical gatherings organised by the great man, and even gets to play the Blüthner piano that Heisenberg bought with his Nobel prize money (not quite a career high point, though – another scene in the book sees Abdyssagin giving a public recital on Tchaikovsky’s own piano).

All in all, this is a thoroughly engrossing book for anyone interested in the cultural and intellectual overlaps between science and music. As I said at the start, it’s nothing like as hard-going as the title might suggest. There’s no specialist scientific jargon, and very little on the musical side either – even in the last few chapters where Abdyssagin discusses some of his own compositions. Of course, not all fans of quantum physics will be into classical music – and vice versa – but those who are will find plenty to interest them in this book.

Paperback:   
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Andrew May - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...