The Music of Pythagoras

by Kitty Ferguson

  1. The planets and Earth orbit the Sun. The Moon orbits the Earth.

  2. The Sun is not at the center of a planet’s orbit [in other words, planetary orbits are eccentric], meaning that each planet has a maximum and minimum distance from the Sun and also passes through all other distances between the maximum and minimum.

  3. The five regular polyhedra dictate the number of planets: six.

  4. The polyhedra alone cannot determine the distance from the Sun, since the orbits are eccentric (see proposition 2). Other principles are needed to establish the orbits and the diameters and the eccentricities.

  5. A planet’s velocity is inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse, and the Sun, “the source of motion,” is one focus of the ellipse. [This was Kepler’s first law of planetary motion, which he had discovered while writing Astronomia nova.]

  6. If two objects move the same actual distance, but one of them is farther away than the other, the movement of the one farther away appears smaller than the one nearer. So, if a planet never changed its speed, then, viewed from the Sun, its motions when it is farthest away would appear smaller than its motions when it is nearest. But a planet does change its speed. Its motion is not the same at its nearest and farthest points, and the difference is in proportion to the distance from the Sun. In other words, the apparent sizes of the motions are different for two reasons: The actual size of the motion is smaller. Distance makes the size of the motion look smaller. So the apparent sizes of the motions are very nearly the inverse square of the proportion of their distances from the Sun.

  7. When it comes to celestial harmony, it is motions as seen from the Sun that are important. Motions as seen from the Earth are irrelevant.

  8. The ratio of the squares of the orbital periods of two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their average distances from the Sun. [This was the great “harmonic law,” one of Kepler’s most significant discoveries. Kepler made the discovery as he was finishing the book and came back and inserted it in this list.]

  9–13. [These have to do with applying the harmonic law. Kepler tried to spell out more clearly that the ratio of the motions of two planets as they draw closer or move apart, together with the ratio of their periodic times, determine the extreme distances they can have (closest and farthest from the Sun), and this determines how eccentric their orbits are.]

  Kepler eventually came to the conclusion that celestial harmony could not possibly be audible. There were no sounds in the heavens. How could they be enjoyed? Knowing or calculating the path lengths was too complicated to give pleasure in an instinctive way. The harmony of the cosmos could be best appreciated from the Sun itself, in the visible arcs of the planetary motions as they would be seen from there.7 (Hence number 7 in his list.)

  Think of the Sun, with yourself standing on it, as being at the center of a huge clock face with the planets moving on large, nearly circular pathways near the rim of the clock face. The entire orbit of a planet is 360 degrees, all the way around the clock. The distance between one and two o’clock, viewed from the center of the clock, is 30 degrees. You, on the Sun, see Earth circling you—though “circling” is not quite the right word, since Earth’s orbit is not round but slightly elliptical. Earth is at aphelion (the part of its orbit farthest from the Sun and you). You watch for a twenty-four-hour period and find that Earth has moved 57′3″ (57 “minutes” and 3 “seconds”). Since there are sixty minutes in a degree, Earth has moved almost one degree. Suppose, instead, you are viewing Earth when it is at perihelion (the part of its orbit closest to the Sun). Now you find that Earth’s motion is faster, 61′18″ in twenty-four hours, more than 1 degree. Those two measurements—Earth’s apparent diurnal motions at aphelion (57′3″) and perihelion (61′18″)—are not far different from one another. Earth’s orbit is not very eccentric.

  Kepler pondered how these two numbers might be adjusted so as to produce a harmonious interval in music. By changing 57′3″ to 57′28″ (a very small adjustment) he could make the interval a concinna, an interval that sounded pleasant in a melody though not when the two notes were played simultaneously. Kepler made similar tiny adjustments for the other planets’ orbits. The most troublesome was Venus, whose motion varied so slightly that its musical interval was a diesis. That was small indeed but still fell into Kepler’s category of concinna.

  Having worked with each planet individually, calculating and adjusting the relationship between its motion at aphelion and at perihelion, Kepler turned to studying the motions of pairs of planets, and was pleased to find fairly good harmony. The small adjustments necessary could, Kepler wrote, easily be “swallowed” without detriment to the astronomy he had constructed using Tycho’s observational data. Again Venus was a problem, and so was Mercury, but their motions were not yet well established anyway.

  Satisfied with the way things were going so far, Kepler proceeded to assign actual notes to each of the planets at aphelion and perihelion and found that when he built a scale with Saturn (the lowest note) at aphelion, the result was a durus scale, a major scale. With Saturn at perihelion the result was a mollis scale, a minor scale. Planetary motion apparently did involve both types of scale. Using other planets as the starting note produced the different modes used in ancient music and church music.*

  Thus far, all of these combinations had the planets at the extremes of their motions, at aphelion or perihelion. Particularly for the planets most distant from the Sun, such opportunities would actually occur only rarely. However, if the planets involved in the harmony did not have to be at those extreme positions, the harmonic opportunities were much more numerous. For example: With Saturn moving between the pitches G and B (its pitches at perihelion and aphelion) and Jupiter between B and D, Kepler found, along the way, intervals of an octave, an octave plus a major or minor third, a fourth, and a fifth. Mercury, the true coloratura in the company, offered even more opportunities because the difference between its pitches at perihelion and aphelion was greater than an octave, and it made that change in only forty-four days. The result was that Mercury as it moved along sang every harmonic interval at least once with each of the other planets.8

  As Kepler calculated it, two-note harmonies of this sort occur almost every day, and Mercury, Earth, and Mars even sing three-part harmony fairly often. Venus, with so little eccentricity to its orbit, hardly varies its pitch at all, making it a sort of Johnny One-Note in the choir. If there is to be harmony with Venus, it must be when another planet slides into harmony with her, not the other way around. Four-note harmonies occur either because Mercury, Earth, and Mars are in adjustment with Venus’ monotone, or because they have waited long enough for the slow-changing bass voice of Jupiter or Saturn to ease into the right note. “Harmonies of four planets,” wrote Kepler, “begin to spread out among the centuries; those of five planets, among myriads of years.”9 As for harmony among all six planets—that grand and greatest “universal harmony”—the chord would be huge, spanning more than seven octaves. (You could not play it on most modern pianos. You would need an organ.) Kepler thought it might be possible for it to occur in the heavens only once in the entire history of the universe. Perhaps one might determine the moment of creation by calculating the past moment when all six planets joined in harmony. Kepler thought about the words of God to Job: “Where were you when I laid the Earth’s foundation... while the morning stars sang together?”

  Kepler dared to move ahead to what he felt was the true test of his theory: “Let us therefore extract, from the harmonies, the intervals of the planets from the Sun, using a method of calculation that is new and never before attempted by anyone.”10 If you did not know the astronomy of the solar system, could you deduce it correctly from the harmonic scheme he believed he had discovered? Starting with the best harmony and figuring out what planetary orbits and motions this harmony implied, what would be the observable consequences of the cosmos’ adhering to this harmony? Kepler used Tych
o Brahe’s data for comparison and concluded that “all approach very closely to those intervals which I found from the Brahe observations. In Mercury alone there is a small difference.”

  Kepler proceeded to compare the solar system as dictated by his harmonic scheme with the solar system as dictated by his polyhedral theory. His conclusion was that the polyhedra, nested in the way he had earlier suggested, had been God’s rather loose model for the solar system. It dictated how many planets there would be and the approximate dimensions of the spheres within which they moved. It was a sort of sketch, with the final dimensions filled out by the harmonic proportions among the planets’ apparent motions as viewed from the Sun. The concept of “harmonies” was required to reflect an eternally fluid system like that found among real planets in motion, and the real solar system could not be understood apart from its motion.

  Nearing the end of his book, Kepler imagined himself drifting off to sleep to the strains of the planetary harmony, “warmed by having drunk a generous draught . . . from the cup of Pythagoras.”11 He is soon dreaming about pure, simple beings who might live on the Sun, in the right position to appreciate the harmony, and of creatures on the other planets: It would be a terrible waste if there were none. They, like Earth dwellers, have no way of appreciating the harmony directly and can only learn of it, as humans had, by a combination of observation and reasoning. Kepler wrote a prayer that God would be praised by the heavens, by the Sun, Moon, and planets, by the celestial harmonies and their beholders—“by you above all, happy old Mästlin, for you used to inspire these things I have said, and you nourished them with hope”—and by his, Kepler’s, own soul. He ended with a return to the old idea that was inherent from the start in the Pythagorean discovery of musical ratios: that one does not have to know about them to be moved by music. There is a mysterious inherent connection between human souls and the underlying pattern of the universe that affects us without our understanding why or how. The same was true, Tycho Brahe had thought, of the design of his palace/observatory. Kepler wrote:

  It does not suffice to say that these harmonies are for the sake of Kepler and those after him who will read his book. Nor indeed are aspects of planets on Earth for the sake of astronomers, but they insinuate themselves generally to all, even peasants, by a hidden instinct.12

  With modern hindsight, it seems Kepler took an odd, eccentric road indeed to arrive at his great “harmonic” law. He found it twice, at first rejecting it because of a computational error on March 8, 1618, and then discovering that it was correct a few weeks later, on May 15. The comment has sometimes been made that the harmonic law was an accidental discovery in the midst of a labyrinth of worthless musical/mathematical speculation, and that Kepler hardly realized he had made an important discovery. But Kepler definitely knew it was significant. It was in response to this discovery that he fell to his knees and exclaimed, “My God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.” Without the underpinning of modern mathematics and the modern scientific method, the convoluted musical path Kepler took may have been the only way he could have got there. After all, he was the one who did get there. Kepler had one of the truest ears in history for the harmony of mathematics and geometry.

  CHAPTER 17

  Enlightened and Illuminated

  Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries

  KEPLER’S CONTEMPORARY GALILEO wrote that “Science” was to be found “in a huge book that stands always open before our eyes—the universe.” But to understand it, one needed to be able to understand the language, and “the language is mathematics.”1 Galileo was not the first in his family to win a place in history. His father, Vincenzo, appears in textbooks of music history as a prominent musician of the sixteenth century—a composer, one of the best music theorists of his time, and a fine lutenist. One of his areas of research was ancient Greek music, and there is a story that when he read Boethius’ De musica, the account of Pythagoras hanging weights on lengths of string, plucking the strings, and discovering the ratios of musical harmony piqued his curiosity.2 Amazingly, no records survive, from all the prior centuries during which scholars had been reading Boethius, of anyone trying this to see whether it would work. Vincenzo discovered, of course, that it did not, but he went on experimenting with the physics of vibrating strings. When his son watched a lamp swinging in the Pisa cathedral and first decided to experiment with pendulums, perhaps he had in mind his father’s tests with weights and strings.

  Two decades later, the younger Galileo, though largely oblivious to the work Kepler was doing, had become personally convinced that the Copernican system was correct, and he was looking for physical evidence to support that opinion and convince other scholars. Copernicus had mentioned in De revolutionibus that the planet Venus might supply important evidence in the case against an Earth-centered cosmos. Venus, reflecting the Sun’s light, waxes and wanes as the Moon does, but if the Ptolemaic arrangement of the cosmos were correct, Earth dwellers would never be positioned in such a way as to see the face of Venus anywhere near fully lit (the equivalent of a full Moon). As the first decade of the seventeenth century drew to a close, the newly invented telescope (Galileo did not invent it but was putting it to better use than anyone else) made it possible to observe the phases of Venus as never before, and in 1610 Galileo followed up on Copernicus’ suggestion. He found that Venus had a full range of phases. How could any scholar fail to see that this was irrefutable evidence in favor of Copernicus? But Galileo’s Catholic colleagues included a group of recalcitrant scholars who remind one of an unusually virulent strain of acusmatici.

  Except in the case of Giordano Bruno, whose offenses by church standards were so flagrant and numerous that he would almost surely have been burned at the stake no matter where he thought the center of the universe was, the Catholic church hierarchy had for centuries been rather sluggishly tolerant of new astronomical theories. Not a murmur was heard when Nicholas of Cusa, in the early fifteenth century, put the Earth in motion and removed it from the center of the universe, nor when Copernicus published De revolutionibus in 1543. Two of Copernicus’ strongest supporters were prominent Catholic clergy. But in 1616, when both Galileo and his opponents were pushing the church for a ruling on the Copernican question, a decree was issued condemning the “new” astronomy, though not actually calling it heresy—a technicality perhaps, but a victory for Galileo and the cardinals who supported him. In this decree, the Pythagoreans took an unfair hit:

  And whereas it has also come to the knowledge of the said Congregation that the Pythagorean doctrine—which is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture—of the motion of the Earth and the immobility of the Sun, which is also taught by Nicolaus Copernicus . . . is now being spread abroad and accepted by many, as may be seen from a certain letter of a Carmelite Father.

  The Carmelite father who had put the Pythagoreans in the range of fire was the Reverend Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini. His letter, dated the year before the decree, was titled “On the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and of Copernicus Concerning the Motion of the Earth, and the Stability of the Sun, and the New Pythagorean System of the World.” Foscarini insisted this doctrine was “consonant with truth and not opposed to Holy Scripture.” The church’s “General Congregation of the Index,” which made official judgments on such matters, felt differently. Copernicus’ book De revolutionibus—seventy-three years after its publication—was “suspended until corrected,” and Foscarini’s work was “altogether prohibited and condemned.” It took seventeen more years of on-and-off sparring, and Galileo’s book Dialogo, for matters to come to a truly dangerous head in his famous trial. The Catholic church, for centuries the guardian and bastion of learning, had turned foolish to the point of malign senility and condemned herself and Italy—the ancient home of Pythagoras—to what was virtually a new scientific dark age. The center of scientific endeavor and achievement moved, irretrievably, to northern Europe and England.

  As the scientific revolution continued north of t
he Alps in the mid-seventeenth century, Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion and his Rudolfine Tables, based on Tycho Brahe’s observations, rightly gave him his earthly immortality, but his polyhedral theory and most of Harmonice mundi were consigned to the cabinet of curiosities. No one took nested polyhedrons or cosmic chords and scales seriously or followed up on them as science. They had been the odd and unlikely midwives to Kepler’s “new astronomy,” helping birth the future, but in doing so had relegated themselves to the past. However, the conviction that numbers and harmony and symmetry were guides to truth because the universe was created according to a rational, orderly plan began to be treated as a given, trustworthy enough to underpin what would later be called the scientific method.

  No one was using the words “science” or “scientific” yet in their modern sense, but the process for determining what was and was not true about nature and the universe was continuing to evolve, and people were discussing and beginning to agree about how this process should work. The French scientist and philosopher René Descartes, one of the first to try to establish a solid foundation for human understanding of the world, chose mathematics as the only trustworthy road to sure knowledge.3 He tried to show that a single, united system of logical mathematical theory could account for everything that happens in the physical universe. Christiaan Huygens, Edmond Halley, and Isaac Newton all shared the conviction that when observations were inadequate, one could even with some confidence go out on a limb on the assumption that the universe is orderly, and discovering new examples of “order” was beginning to be regarded as a sign that one was on the right track. Robert Hooke, in the field of biology, suggested that crystals like those that may have alerted the Pythagoreans to the existence of the five regular solids occurred because their atoms had an orderly arrangement.4 Robert Boyle wrote his book The Sceptical Chymist, which many identify as marking the beginning of modern chemistry, and cited Pythagoras, asserting that the final decisions of science must be made on the basis of both the evidence of the senses and the operation of reason. This balance, on which Kepler had performed such prodigious acrobatics as he struggled to write his Astronomia nova—without thinking of it as a “scientific method”—was becoming the balance of science.