The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe, Stephon Alexander, Basic Books, 2016. $27.50 (254 pp.). ISBN 978-0-46503-499-4
In The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe, Brown University physics professor and saxophonist Stephon Alexander writes that he set himself “the challenge to find an isomorphism between jazz and cosmology,” his two great intellectual and spiritual pursuits.
His formal resolution to that quest appears in “A cyclic universe approach to fine tuning,” a paper that he, Sam Cormack, and Marcelo Gleiser published in a June 2016 issue of Physics Letters B. As Alexander explains in his book, the idea behind the paper was to identify a jazz musician’s improvisation through a cyclic chord pattern with the universe “improvising” new fundamental constants (due to the dynamics of a ghost-like scalar field) through each cycle of a closed bouncing universe. Much of The Jazz of Physics is dedicated to providing enough physics to explain the fine-tuning problem—Why do the fundamental constants take on values that allow the universe and us to exist?— to describing other physics concepts that are central to his paper, and to making connections from them to jazz and music more broadly.
Over the course of the book, Alexander explores physics concepts by focusing on general relativity and string theory, with its associated M-theory and D-branes. He also takes the reader through his own personal detours into neuroscience and biophysics, including work relating the Ising model of quantum mechanical spins to connections between neurons. We return to the boundary between music and physics, where Alexander discusses acoustic analogs to black holes, in which a shock front in an acoustic medium can keep information from propagating back against the shock just as an event horizon keeps information from leaving a black hole. He devotes an extended chapter to the inflationary universe and introduces the cosmic background radiation, its power spectrum, and the horizon problem. Readers learn that the power spectrum is driven by acoustic waves in the early universe—thus, the universe is an instrument that plays itself.
Musically, we touch on the circle of fifths and the “sheets of sound” that exploded onto the scene with saxophonist John Coltrane’s 1960 album Giant Steps. We meet the pop and avant-garde musician and producer Brian Eno at a quantum gravity reception. Alexander later called him a “sound cosmologist.” From a visit to Eno, Alexander draws a lesson about synthesizing arbitrary sounds from pure sine waves. A discussion of avant-garde composer John Cage’s theory that all “sounds are, of their nature, harmonious” brings us to the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, originally seen as “noise” in Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson’s detector. The transition demonstrates how few bars Alexander needs to shift between physics and music.
Such a diversity of topics in a book just over 250 pages runs the risk of being facile, and in the chapter called “A Journey into Mark Turner’s Quantum Brain,” Alexander does cross a line. In that chapter, we learn about both tenor saxophonist Turner’s musical style and the uncertainty principle. Turner, who studied the music of Coltrane and pianist Lennie Tristano, observes that “whenever I am most certain of the next note to play, the more possibilities open up for the notes that follow.” Alexander uses that peg to hang a description of the uncertainty principle, in which knowledge of the position of a particle opens up more possibilities for its momentum. He then discusses the principle in detail, having already discussed Fourier transforms and waves. However, the trope of applying the quantum mechanical notion that measuring something destroys its coherence to a non-quantum-mechanical process like Turner’s unique and powerful improvisations hits an off note, at least to me.
At the heart of the book lies “Coltrane’s Mandala,” which combines the symmetries of the 12 notes of the western chromatic scale (A, A#, B, C … G, and G#) with the 5 notes of the pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, and G) used in musical styles throughout the world, including jazz. The Jazz of Physics opens with an enigmatic visit by Alexander to the since deceased Yusef Lateef—a jazz multi-instrumentalist who was then a University of Massachusetts professor—for a discussion of the Mandala. It closes with an argument that Coltrane created the Mandala by synthesizing his understanding of relativity and applying it to his music.
The most interesting portions of the book are autobiographical. Alexander grew up in a Trinidadian family living in the Bronx. Later, he would discover the beauty of learning and the thrill of performing music and physics. And in time, he would rub shoulders with distinguished musicians and physicists. His stories are rich and personal; in them we see originality in physics and music and the growth of a mind finding its own path. Not only does he show the title and abstract of “A cyclic universe approach to fine tuning,” but he also offers an image of the cover art of his 2014 album with Erin Rioux, Here Comes Now. Alexander communicates the joys and fears of life on the knife-edge of creativity.
But did Alexander achieve his goal of uncovering an isomorphism between physics and jazz akin to that between a resonant electrical circuit and a mechanical oscillator? Perhaps he has, though his short readable book does not present enough detail for the evaluation of such a claim. However, he has accomplished at least as much by presenting the metaphors driving creative inspiration in the creation of both new physical insights and new beautiful sounds.
David Phillips is a staff scientist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is developing new instruments and techniques to detect planets around other stars.
