Heres an injury from early in my mentor career: After listening to a trainees song in class, I suggested he repeat a phrase. Was it simple custom? I needed a much better reaction.
Absolutely. One of the things SETI– the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence– does is that they look for really routine mathematical signals since they assume that nature will not supply such a thing– natures unpleasant, therefore nature cant do anything so routine. If you find an incredibly routine signal, youre hoping that it was sent out by somebody who controls their environment, who made it go that method.
Im not a scientist– I consistently Google the responses to my daughters fourth-grade math concerns– however I do practice a kind of science: Im a songwriting professor, and up through the Renaissance, music was considered a close relative of math, astronomy and geometry. That may be hard to think of today, but as I have a look at the surprising images that the James Webb Telescope has been beaming back to us since July– the spiraling “cartwheel” galaxies, binary stars and echoes of the Big Bang– I can see the connection. In astronomy, components “resolve” into familiar chemicals or easy to understand orbits; in music, they “solve” into tunes and choruses we can sing back.
Astrophysicists and songwriters have an affinity for repetition. Its frequently utilized as a tool in music, however for astronomers, there seems to be a presumption that repeating implies forces that are actively at work, maybe even intelligently so.
I wrote my most recent book, Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter, the same method I write tunes– I began with a question, followed it, and hung on for the flight. A lot of the experts I talked to werent songwriters, but still come to grips with comparable concerns in their own fields, and in their own methods: This was definitely the case with cosmologist Janna Levin, a 2012 Guggenheim fellow who presently holds the Claire Tow Professorship of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College. Levins 2016 book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, informs the story of the Nobel Prize-winning group that assisted build the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which spots gravitational waves brought on by black holes as they “slosh in space-time … like waves on an ocean.” (Incidentally, you can hear gravitational waves on your own, today.).
Philosophers and authors have long struggled over the nature of repeating and its interest the human mind. Theyve gone over past lives (Plato), time spirals (Gianbattista Vico), eternal returns (Friedrich Nietzsche) and the possibility that repeating isnt even possible (Heraclitus). Unfortunately, none of the ideas I found were especially practical, particularly for a songwriting class. I questioned if a universal response may instead come from deep space itself.
What I received from Levin was more than an explanation of musical repeating. It was a new interpretation of truth itself.
Regularly repeatable responses might not be surprising in fourth-grade mathematics, however when a high-powered telescope offers quickly recognizable patterns drifting hundreds of millions of light years away, its hard not to ask: How is that possible? And similarly, in the realm of music: What causes us to develop, and react to, a similar type of repetition in our art?
There are huge stars that collapse and die, and they dont rather make black holes– theyre not big enough– so they make a neutron star. It literally has a beam of light, and as it spins, that beam sweeps past you, not irregularly– radio astronomers found one, and it was clock on, man. And that can happen, that nature makes something thats so perfect.
Simply as tunes repeat in choruses, developments in space take easy to understand shapes. Envisioned here are the large Cartwheel galaxy and two smaller buddy galaxies.
NASA/ Illustration by Emily Lakiewicz
What does it state about humans that were so captivated by repeated details?
Since mathematics made us, I am a huge follower that we inherit mathematical structures. Development is guided by forces of nature– thats how we develop– and those forces, not surprisingly, leave an imprint in the structure of our minds. Obviously they have to be mathematical. And in some bigger, hereditary sense of who our household was, who our moms and dads were– our moms and dads were the laws of physics. And in our minds, its encoded there. And were finding the structure of our minds. So I can sit there with a notepad and discover algebra, and discover geometry, discover topology, discover various branches of mathematics, due to the fact that its in my mind.
LIGO has a real hard time discovering something that just bursts as soon as. One of the things we actually hope from LIGO going forward is that it will hear something for long enough that itll be able to hear repeatings. And those repetitions will allow it to identify something.
And the repeating corrects for errors. You require the repeating initially to understand what the words imply, but then I desire to be able to state something special by assembling those words in a specific way.
Thats what Im speaking about!
And the reproducibility of something like pi links us to each other, and possibly to whoevers out there.
Repetition, whether from the same calculation or the very same source, makes something genuine.
Without any defects, without any expert, without any mistake– just the pure terrain of the thoughts. The only location pi exists is in my mind, and yours. How is that not real?
Music.
That is as real to me as if I had, and in some sense its more real since my tape procedure is imperfect, but in my mind, its ideal. How is that not genuine?
Thats what science is about– reproducibility, experimentation, the fact that somebody else can do it and get the exact same answer. I was speaking to somebody from Oxford who said, “Look, this is a real experiment: In your mind, envision a circle, divide it by the size. You have just obtained the formula for pi. That is an experiment. And anyone can do the very same experiment in their minds and get precisely the exact same answer.”.
Philosophers and authors have actually long struggled over the nature of repetition and its appeal to the human mind. You require the repeating first to understand what the words suggest, however then I want to be able to say something unique by putting together those words in a certain way.
Tunes.
Outer Space.
I believe a lot of people who are as inclined as I am towards abstraction battle with “reality” because its less genuine. “What do you indicate that chair was blue? I believe its persimmon-colored.” “I think its lavender.” Like, theres less reality in reality than there is in our minds. So its quite soothing to understand that if youre from Bangladesh, 200 years ago, and you did the exact same pi thought experiment, its 3.14159 etc. Theres a sense of connectedness thats really extensive. I think if you believe of repetition as an evolutionary trait, then it makes sense that we have it.
Astronomy.
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One of the things we truly hope from LIGO going forward is that it will hear something for long enough that itll be able to hear repetitions. And those repeatings will allow it to identify something. I believe if you believe of repeating as an evolutionary characteristic, then it makes sense that we have it.
Astronomers.