Questions and answers with Peter Pesic

Peter Pesic is musician-in-residence and tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is also the director of the college’s new Science Institute , which will begin offering week-long sessions this summer. The sessions will draw on the college’s five-decade history of teaching science through the reading and discussion of original texts. Pesic is also co-editor-in-chief of Springer’s Perspectives in Physics.

Since earning his bachelor’s from Harvard University in 1969 and his doctorate from Stanford University in 1975, both degrees in physics, Pesic has gone on to publish dozens of papers, essays, and books and has earned numerous awards and honors. Among his honors, he is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society.

His five books, all published by MIT Press, include Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science (2000) and Sky in a Bottle (2005). His most recent,

Music and the Making of Modern Science (2014), was reviewed by Physics Today in this month’s issue. It has received the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in Music and the Performing Arts.

Physics Today recently caught up with Pesic to discuss Music and the Making of Modern Science.

PT: What got you interested in writing about this topic, and how did your background in music and your experience at St. John’s help you in the process?

Pesic: Music and science have occupied me since childhood. While studying physics at Stanford, I began to play the piano seriously; I remember duet sessions with Sid Drell, my adviser, who loved to play the violin. After finishing my doctorate, I felt I needed a different path than the normal career in physics; by then, I was giving concerts and spending most of my time on music.

St. John’s College offered me the chance to learn and teach across a broad curriculum that included philosophy, literature, and music along with science and mathematics, discussed in small tutorials that center on student learning. Here, the faculty are tutors, not professors. This helped me to return to the questions and concepts of physics, now seeing how they first emerged in the words and experiments of their discoverers. Likewise, working with students on music challenged me to explore its fundamental ideas. Gradually, I began to notice places where scientists made significant use of music in the course of their work, which led to this book.

PT: According to the reviewer, you make the provocative statement that “science followed music.” What does it mean?

Pesic: My book presents cases in which developments in music preceded and arguably influenced subsequent developments in science. Such influences go back to the beginnings of Western science in Greece, where music first connected numbers to physical experience on earth, as astronomy connected numbers to the motions of the planets. This deeply colored the later development of Western science as Galileo and others increasingly used mathematics to understand physical phenomena. Thus, Johannes Kepler approached his Third Law via music; Isaac Newton imposed a musical scale on colors. Thomas Young instanced sound and music to argue for the wave theory of light. Later, Erwin Schrödinger invoked overtones to understand wave mechanics, even though he disliked music. And Max Planck spent the year before turning to the blackbody problem experimenting with harmoniums and choruses to investigate whether music was really tuned in equal steps.

PT: In the process of writing the book, how did you go about determining how much emphasis you would place on the history, the philosophy, and the physics?

Pesic: If you look closely, physics is deeply connected to its history and the underlying philosophical questions, though physicists sometimes ignore those connections. For instance, though Albert Einstein often did not bother to give references, he constantly showed a keen interest in the history and philosophy of physics, with which his own work is constantly in dialog. In the course of relating the various episodes in my book, I constantly felt and tried to express this natural interplay between history, philosophy, and physics.

PT: How do you see music influencing contemporary research areas in science? Or vice versa?

Pesic: I think that music is mostly buried within the strata of contemporary physics as it formed over the past few centuries, but that occasionally it still emerges with surprising force. Consider, for instance, the way that string theory persistently engages with musical examples and metaphors; particle physicists still find resonances whose shape exactly recalls that of a vibrating glass.

PT: What’s your next book project?

Pesic: I am now working on a book I call The Polyphonic Mind concerning the emergence and significance of polyphony in Western music, both as a remarkable musical practice—how can the mind grasp several musical lines at once?—and a model for the functioning of the mind itself.

PT: What books are you currently reading?

Pesic: In connection with this new book project, I am reading books on medieval music, like Christopher Page’s The Owl and the Nightingale (Oxford University Press, 1990), trying to understand why people first started to sing several melodies at once. I recently read David Kahn’s Seizing the Enigma (revised edition, Naval Institute Press, 2012), on the breaking of the naval codes during World War II; I have just started Edward Belbruno’s Fly Me to the Moon (Princeton University Press, 2007), on low-fuel approaches to space travel.