Many of the physicists in the generation after Planck continued to be enthusiastic Kultur-
tr ä ger , devoted especially to music. Einstein was famously loyal to his violin and to
Mozart, yet wrote that “ music does not influence research work, but both are nourished
by the same sort of longing, and they complement each other in the satisfaction they offer. ”^1
Indeed, there is no evidence of direct involvement of music in his work such as we have
considered earlier in this book. This was not because music was insignificant for him as
an intellectual or a scientist; as his sister noted,
music served as his only distraction. He could already play Mozart and Beethoven sonatas on the
violin, accompanied by his mother on the piano. He would also sit down at the piano and, mainly
in arpeggios full of tender feeling, constantly search for new harmonies and transitions of his own
invention. And yet it is really incorrect to say that these musical reveries served as a distraction.
Rather, they put him in a peaceful state of mind, which facilitated his reflection. For later on, when
great problems preoccupied him, he often suddenly stood up and declared: “ There, now I ’ ve got it. ”
A solution had suddenly appeared to him.^2
His musicality was so deeply embedded in his larger Weltanschauung that it could no
longer be distinguished from his general views. Einstein ’ s philosophical praise of harmony
and beauty in physical theory may be sublimated expressions of his underlying musical
feeling, but now so generalized and universalized that only the presence of charged terms
like “ harmony ” bears witness to their underlying origins.
We can, though, use this insight to decode what Einstein and others meant by “ beauty ”
in mathematics or physical theory — namely, a kind of architectonic proportion and inter-
relation, an intensity of content, coherence, and significance that makes equations “ elegant ”
rather than cumbersome, at least in their eyes. Though it is frustratingly difficult to go
further than this generality, the elusiveness of the physicists ’ and mathematicians ’ idea of
beauty or harmony is a result of the sedimentation to which Husserl drew attention. Con-
sider, for example, the case of Werner Heisenberg, devoted to the piano from his youth
onward, whose autobiography enshrines a musical moment that he considered definitive
of his path in life. Near Munich, during the turbulent revolutionary days of 1919, he was
18 Unheard Harmonies
