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The Jazz of Physics

The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

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The Jazz of Physics

By: Stephon Alexander
Narrated by: Don Hagen
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About this listen

More than 50 years ago, John Coltrane drew the 12 musical notes in a circle and connected them with straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe.

Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics - a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim - The Jazz of Physics revisits the ancient realm where music, physics, and the cosmos were one. This cosmological journey accompanies Alexander's own tale of struggling to reconcile his passion for music and physics, from taking music lessons as a boy in the Bronx to studying theoretical physics at Imperial College, London's inner sanctum of string theory. Playing the saxophone and improvising with equations, Alexander uncovered the connection between the fundamental waves that make up sound and the fundamental waves that make up everything else. As he reveals, the ancient poetic idea of the "music of the spheres", taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.

Whether you are more familiar with Brian Greene or Brian Eno, John Coltrane or John Wheeler, the Five Percent Nation or why the universe is less than 5 percent visible, there is a new discovery every minute. Covering the entire history of the universe from its birth to its fate, its structure on the smallest and largest scales, The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

©2016 Stephon Alexander (P)2016 Gildan Media LLC Music Physics String Theory Black Hole

Critic Reviews

"Music lovers are at high risk of being inspired by this exploration of the connections between music and physics.... Alexander elegantly charts the progress of science from the ancients through Copernicus and Kepler to Einstein (a piano-player) and beyond, making it clear that what we call genius has a lot to do with convention-challenging courage, a trait shared by each age's great musicians as well." (Keith Blanchard, Wall Street Journal)

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Interesting but flawed blend

I’ve enjoyed the narrator’s performance and style and found the book quite interesting but overall somewhat flawed and unsatisfactory.

The author’s life has been fascinating and it is well told. I’ve enjoyed the blend of biography, popular science and music writing but in the end the audiobook does not fully exploit its full potential and the science part seems at times to be very partisan and one-sided.

On the science side the author presents quite a few hypothesis, sometimes very shaky ones, as if there were already proven facts and never explains that they are in fact not proven and there are other hypothesis to explain certain observable phenomenon.

On the music side the creators of the book have not seem to realised that it is in fact and AUDIObook. Every time there is a passage about music, be it about jazz or musical theory there should be accompanying musical score! The book simply begs for it. When explaining intricacies of musical scales I would have loved to hear not just the words describing them but the actual sound. I understand that there might have been some licensing problems with the music pieces described in the book but to rob us of generic piano sounds described in the book seems just wrong.

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Annoying Sibilance

This would have been enjoyable to listen to but the high sibilance on s j and t’s are extremely unpleasant. Someone should fix it before selling anymore copies of this audio book!

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