The Jazz of Physics

When Stephon Alexander opened up his talk with a quotation from Douglas Hofstadter, he accurately set the tone for the discussion. "Analogy is the core of cognition" was a fitting start for a lecture that focused its attention on finding coincidental parallels between cosmology, quantum mechanics, and improvisational jazz music as a way to help put very abstract and complicated theories into a more digestible form. One of the easiest methods of understanding the unfamiliar is to put it in terms of the familiar. In discussing improvisation, Alexander referred to Albert Einstein as a master of the practice. Whenever the genius was stuck on a problem, he would take a break and play his violin until an idea came. His theories largely started from random thought experiments as opposed to rigid scientific analysis. In the next slide, Alexander introduced another genius, albeit in a completely different field. John Coltrane was a jazz musician whose love of symmetry mirrored that of Einstein's, and he was an avid follower of the latest theories in physics. His Mandala reflected symmetry found in music, and how various scales and keys were related to each other while still keeping their same overall shape, much like modern ideas of cosmology. With these two giants of their fields covered, Alexander began to elaborate on some direct comparisons between jazz and science.

Fourier transforms are a fundamental component of most fields of science and engineering that deal with waves, and serve to deconstruct very complicated waves into constituent single-wavelength waves that have been superimposed on top of each other. For example, a chord in music can be reduced to the notes all played at once to produce it, while individual music notes themselves are also a combination of waves. A waveform of an instrument will produce a dominant frequency that determines pitch, as well as numerous other peaks of reduced amplitude that create the timbre specific to the materials and shape of the instrument. After applying a Fourier transform to the Cosmic Microwave Background, a very similar waveform appears. The primary peak, an "A" note for the record, is the primary frequency of the universe, while the other smaller peaks can be used to determine characteristics about the makeup of the universe, specifically the amount of dark matter and baryonic matter used to create all the material in existence. While this does not indicate a direct connection between a sound-making instrument and the entirety of existence, the parallels between their behaviors intersected in such a way that one was used to better understand the other.

Two jazz improvisational musicians, Mark Turner and Sonny Rawlins, offered to Alexander their strategies for improvisation. Turner said that the "more certain [he is] about note playing, the more possibilities for the next appear." To a physicist, this appears to follow the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in which the more that is known about a particle's position, the more possible trajectories it could be following. A particle can go wherever it wants, so just because it is in one particular location does not mean it will always be heading in one specific direction, just like Turner's note. Rawlins's style involved picking a start and an end state a perfect 5th note from that start. In between those two notes, it was entirely up to Rawlins to choose any of countless combinations of notes as he worked his way to the final note. According to Richard Feynman, a quantum particle will simultaneously take every possible path to a second point, with every path summing up to a straight line from Point A to Point B. The notes of Rawlins's improv work a similar way, taking many different paths within the same piece to reach the same end state. Following this, Alexander reiterated that he could not confirm just how well-versed either Turner or Rawlins were in quantum physics, but the parallels brought up were incredibly helpful to him as he worked to understand the phenomena of quantum mechanics.

While most of the lecture focused on specific examples of physical phenomena and their relation to music, Alexander briefly touched on the relation between jazz improvisation and research strategies. In group improv, a single instrument might solo, but if the other musicians like what direction the soloist is going, they will change their own tunes to better fit it. In the research firm of which Alexander was a member, they often would use this strategy in brainstorming. The instant any of them had an idea, no matter how seemingly unrelated to the current problem, they were encouraged to speak out. Physicists often used analogies in this brainstorming, and if the idea caught on, it could result in discovery. The example he used was "What if quarks were ducks," to which another scientist could respond "then would they swim or fly?" Like musical improvisation, their research would start with the known beginning point and a desired end state, and be allowed to flow in whatever direction the current situation favored.

The entire talk was fascinating in part because I had never even considered that such parallels in two different fields could be possible. Stephon Alexander's thesis brought to mind the 12-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, with its hard set of rules and nearly infinite possibilities that did not always make sense, much like the universe itself. As an engineering major and hobbyist artist, it was refreshing to see the level to which parallels between art and science could be drawn; they are not so irreconcilable after all. More influential though was how I was opened to the power of analogy. I generally prefer art and literature that has a very clear main point, and while it can be subtle in presenting support and secondary messages, the primary should be relatively obvious. I have begun to change that belief to accommodate more opportunity for analogies to take on the role of presenting the main idea. The comparison between the peaks of the CMB and those of an instrument's note was the most influential, just because while I could pretty easily see the connection between quantum theory and instrumental improvisational after accepting the uncertainty theorem's relationship, it was mindblowing that such radically different things as a musical instrument and an image of the early universe could have a strong connection. The use of analogies to present ideas has been around almost as long as human storytelling, from the early tales of gods of nature to Jesus's Parables to filmmaking, but to see it still going strong in rational science shows that it is unlikely to go away.