Music and the Making of Modern Science

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Music and the Making of Modern Science ...

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Music and the Making of Modern Science Peter Pesic The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ...

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec ...

For Alexei and Andrei ...

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Contents ...

Introduction 1 Music and the Origins of Ancient Science 2 The Dream of Oresme 3 Moving the Immovable 4 Hearing the Irrational 5 ...

Alfred North Whitehead once observed that omitting the role of mathematics in the story of modern science would be like performi ...

2 Introduction As Horatio has ties to both Hamlet and Ophelia, music touches both natural philosophy and mathematics. Accordingl ...

Introduction 3 called for irrational and rational quantities on an equal footing. Chapter 4 discusses three central figures in t ...

4 Introduction Throughout his life, the great mathematician Leonhard Euler spent most of his free time on music, to which he dev ...

Introduction 5 chapter 15 connects with the many-dimensional manifolds earlier considered by the math- ematician Bernhard Rieman ...

6 Introduction still requires a sustained, sensitive, and cautious comparison with our usage and its own presuppositions. Restor ...

Introduction 7 hard evidence, Drake ’ s speculation remains only that. Galileo ’ s beautiful pages on music in his Dialogues on ...

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Music entered deeply into the making of modern science because it was already a central element of ancient philosophy. Greek con ...

10 Chapter 1 that fit together to make the harmonia of an octave, which he also uses as a verb, to har- monize, literally meanin ...

Music and the Origins of Ancient Science 11 an odd with an even number, corresponding to the “ limiter ” and “ unlimited ” Philo ...