The New Music of the Spheres

Catalog description

This course traces human understanding of resonances and their significance – from the ideas of Pythagoras and Kepler concerning the potential relationships between musical intervals and planetary motion (the "Music of the Spheres"), to the work of contemporary astronomers discovering and characterizing planets orbiting other stars (“exoplanets”). Along the way, essential methods, discoveries, and recent developments in the study of our own solar system and exoplanets – including theories for and observations of the origins of planetary systems -are investigated, as are the physical and mathematical concepts necessary to describe sound, light, & gravity.