yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Music of Physics | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Now it turns out there happens to be a guy out there who wrote an entire book on the connection between physics and music. An entire book. His name is Stefon Alexander, and he's standing by right now live on video call. You guys, you have him.

Oh, go! Hey, Stefan!

Hello!

Hey, Neil. What's up?

Hey, well, welcome to Star Talk!

Hey, good to be here!

So, you wrote a book, uh, The Jazz of Physics: Stefon Alexander, The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe. That's kind of— that's a—that's a—that's a title right there. But what I want to know is, is there something about physics that you can tell me so that henceforth I will always think of jazz when I encounter it?

I can give you one cool example, and it has to do with improvisation. Um, so what an improvisor has to do is spontaneously create something cool while the music is going on, while the chords are changing. Different jazz musicians have different strategies for doing that. And one thing I discovered is the idea of targeting notes.

So, for example, um, if I start off on a G and at some bars later I end up with a D. That's sort of the beginning point and the endpoint. And in between, um, targeting those two notes, meaning the endpoint note being the G, I can imagine playing many different paths, many different notes. And that's a very, you know, good analogy to Fan's conception of um, quantum mechanics.

Do you have the sax in arm's reach? Maybe you can play sort of a particle improvisation for us, just briefly?

Um, sure! I can try something. Hold on a second.

Okay, okay. I don't know if you can hear me.

All right, we're ready for you. Go!

What I got— Hey guys, I just got off the plane!

[Music]

So, I was— that nice! All right.

More Articles

View All
Assignment Reports on Khan Academy
This video will highlight how to monitor student progress with assignment reports on Khan Academy. The assignment score report is a tool for teachers to view and analyze their students’ performance on assigned tasks. Start by selecting the class from you…
Misnomers
Hey Vsauce, Michael here. I’m sorry. Look, I didn’t name myself, but apparently Michael is the ninth most disliked baby name for a boy - according to a survey by BabyNameWizard.com. At least it didn’t top the charts like the rhyming ‘a den’ names - Jayden…
Worked example: estimating sin(0.4) using Lagrange error bound | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
Estimating the sign of 0.4 using a McLaurin polynomial, what is the least degree of the polynomial that assures an error smaller than 0.001? So, what are we talking about here? Well, we could take some function and estimate it with an Nth degree McLaurin…
ORDERING EVERYTHING ON THE MENU WITH YOUTUBE AD REVENUE
What’s up you guys? It’s Graham here! So thanks to all of you watching my videos, I made about $200 so far on YouTube ad revenue. Now, instead of just going and putting that money in my bank account, I thought it would be a lot more fun to give it all bac…
How to organize your life using Notion| My Notion Tour + free templates
Hi, guys! What’s up? It’s me, Ruri. Today, I’m back with another video. So today, I’m gonna show you and explain to you my full Notion setup, what I use, how I use. So that you can start your new school year organized and everything put together, you know…
Bumbling presuppositionalists
Uh, presuppositionalism, uh, is represented on YouTube by people like Paleocrites and Antiplagion. I imagine it goes down very well with Christians, and it’s full of snappy sound bites like “the impossibility of the contrary.” It allows you to say to your…