Tuning the Atoms 253
inner possibility and necessity of this sort of accomplishment? ”^24 Insisting that he does
not thereby denigrate the achievement of modern science, Husserl nevertheless stresses,
from the point of view of his phenomenological analysis, “ that the true meaning of these
theories — the meaning which is genuine in terms of their origins — remained and had to
remain hidden from the physicists, including the great and the greatest. ” His geological
metaphor implies that the later layers of scientific work necessarily bury and thereby render
invisible the earlier “ strata ” on which they themselves were built. Yet though he thinks
that, as they build ever further, scientific workers must remain increasingly unaware of the
buried strata on which their edifice rests, Husserl notes that later readers “ can make it
self-evident again, can reactivate the self-evidence ” by gradually desedimenting the
impacted layers of assumptions, bringing to light their “ intentional history ” and their latent
implications.^25
In these terms, we could be said to be unearthing the sedimented role of music as a
historically relevant stratum, though one that was, by the late nineteenth century, fairly
well buried and increasingly irrelevant to contemporary scientific practice. To some extent,
this is an accurate description of the process just discussed in the cases of Balmer, Ray-
leigh, and their successors. Yet in what follows, Husserl ’ s metaphor and its implications
will break down because, rather than simply lying buried and ever-more-forgotten, the
musical theme will break out again more or less overtly and not through self-conscious
attempts to “ desediment ” the layers. To return to the geological metaphor, strata may not
always remain sedimented beneath the surface but can in fact emerge into view as outcrop-
pings that not only indicate the buried past but also become manifest in the visible land-
scape, the very rocks we see around us.^26