This post is about the connection of physicists - and physics - to music. While writing, I felt it divided naturally into two sections.
The Music of the Physicists
It has been noticed that several well known physicists were also enthusiastic musicians. Perhaps the best known case is that of Einstein who famously played his violin whenever he was stuck on a problem and needed inspiration. In his biography of the great scientist (page 292), Walter Isaacson recounts that when Einstein landed in America for the first time (April 2, 1921), he had his pipe in one hand and his violin case in the other.
Further digging readily reveals more examples: Galileo played keyboard and lute, Planck piano and organ, Heisenberg piano, Satyen Bose esraj, Feynman bongos, Bhabha violin, Fabiola Gianotti piano, Stephon Alexander saxophone. Some of these are referred to in this article. Some relevant pictures can be found here.
It may be pointed out as counterexamples that Newton and Schrodinger, for example, were not interested in practical music. I think it will take further surveying to establish if physicists incline to music any more or less than people in other professions (Politics: Lincoln played the violin, Paderewski piano; Computers: Steve Jobs played guitar, Don Knuth is an organist and a composer; Sports: Shaq has released four rap albums, Oscar de la Hoya is a Grammy-nominated singer; etc...).
The Physics of Music
Musical thinking has guided physics' search for natural laws. Pythagoras and Ptolemy searched for harmonies in the physical universe. The scientific thought of Kepler and Newton was also influenced by this approach. The modern study of sound probably started with Galileo, followed by Mersenne and D'Alembert, whose name is associated with the wave equation. Around the same time, Euler wrote three volumes on acoustics. The field received a solid foundation with Helmholtz's On the sensations of tone as a physiological basis for the theory of music and Lord Rayleigh's The Theory of Sound. Wikipedia provides a readable and compact history of the subject.
But it does not mention the Nobel laureate C. V. Raman, who published extensively on acoustics, including some of the earliest papers [e.g. Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. A1 179-188 (1935)] analyzing the nontrivial physics of membranophones like tabla and mridangam (e.g. the production of a definite pitch by loading the skins with resin - the black discs located at the center of the drumhead).
In his book A Beautiful Question Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek points out (page 170) that the equations that govern the behavior of atoms do not look very different from the equations that describe musical instruments. This is of course because they both deal with waves - acoustic waves for the instruments and waves of probability for the atoms. Theories currently advancing the frontier of physics have retained this paradigm at their core: considering strings and membranes to be the fundamental constituents of the universe.
A recent, well illustrated, and detailed book on the topic by Tsuji and Muller that I found informative: Physics and Music: Essential Connections and Illuminating Excursions. See how well you do on the quiz in Section 1.1 - you can access it in the preview material accessible online.
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