Danube (Panther)
by Claudio Magris · 10 Jan 2011 · 459pp · 154,280 words
, convinced in their innermost being that the roundness and lightness of the ball and the mobile symmetry of the monastery fountain are expressions of the music of the spheres. That rounded harmony has its own ecumenical grandeur, the wide, embracing gesture that imparts order and assurance to the world in the evening benediction. But
Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings · 2 Oct 2013 · 326pp · 97,089 words
of its instruments played different notes all at once. If a planet hunter was too focused on a handful of isolated sweet tones in the music of the spheres, he or she could miss other planets hiding in the sour notes and residual noise. The smaller the world, the weaker its signal, and the
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.26 The churches of the day rang with approximations of the music of the spheres. The plainsongs and chants of the medieval cathedrals were being supplanted by polyphony, the music of many voices that would reach an epiphany in the
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, carried aboard the spacecraft as an artifact of human civilization, includes a set of computer-generated tones representing the relative velocities of the planets—the music of the spheres made audible at last. But the sun of learning is paired with a dark star, and Kepler’s life remained as vexed with tumult as
Cosmos
by Carl Sagan · 1 Jan 1980 · 404pp · 131,034 words
, and even many centuries later. Ptolemy’s aetherial spheres, imagined in medieval times to be made of crystal, are why we still talk about the music of the spheres and a seventh heaven (there was a “heaven,” or sphere for the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and one more for
Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden · 27 Sep 2021
. A thousand years after Anaximenes, alchemists were claiming to extract pure quintessence from their potions, while two thousand years after Pythagoras, composers were still writing music of the spheres. Entities may become superfluous but they are often remarkably durable. FIGURE 4: Position of Mars against background stars on consecutive nights. Yet, although crystal spheres
What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge
by Marcus Du Sautoy · 18 May 2016
reality, has been raging for millennia. Is the universe dancing to the sound of my trumpet or shimmying to the glissando of my cello? THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES How did I personally come to know about these electrons and quarks that are believed to be the last layer of my dice? I’ve
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skies. The orbits of the planets were believed to be in a perfect mathematical relationship to each other, giving rise to the idea of the music of the spheres. More importantly for understanding the make-up of my dice, it was also believed that discrete numbers rather than a continuous glissando were the key
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could build all matter. Oxygen: 8 protons, 8 neutrons and 8 electrons. Sodium: 11 protons, 12 neutrons and 11 electrons. It was as if the music of the spheres was singing out and the foundations of matter were these notes: protons, electrons and neutrons. All matter seemed to be made up of whole-number
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, 278–9, 280; modelling of future trajectories 63–4, 72; motion of 29, 33–41, 62–4, 72, 88, 193, 279, 280; multiverse and 231; music of the spheres and 81; new habitable 3; singularities and 280 Plato 81–2, 113, 188, 208–9, 304, 368, 373, 409–10, 412 Pleiades 20, 250 Plough
Big Bang
by Simon Singh · 1 Jan 2004 · 492pp · 149,259 words
his research into elliptical planetary orbits, Kepler indulged in work of varying quality. He misguidedly revived the Pythagorean theory that the planets resonated with a ‘music of the spheres’. According to Kepler, the speed of each planet generated particular notes (e.g. doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah and te). The Earth emitted the
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-21, 220, 225, 248-51; Pasadena seminar (1933) 274-6,275; telescopes 187-9, 220, 222,272,373,374 Mullard Observatory 416 multiverse 488,492 music of the spheres 7-9,59 myth 4-6,7,18,80, 469,490 Narlikar, Jayant 439, 441 NASA 453-5 National Academy of Sciences, US 189, 206
Bureaucracy
by David Graeber · 3 Feb 2015 · 252pp · 80,636 words
the universe was, on some ultimate level at least, composed of numbers—a notion now largely remembered for the rather charming concept of the inaudible “music of the spheres.” The cosmos, according to the Pythagoreans, was rational because it was ultimately an expression of the principles of number, pitch, and vibration, and when the
To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science
by Steven Weinberg · 17 Feb 2015 · 532pp · 133,143 words
instance, Cicero, in On the Republic, tells a story in which the ghost of the great Roman general Scipio Africanus introduces his grandson to the music of the spheres. It was in pure mathematics rather than in physics that the Pythagoreans made the greatest progress. Everyone has heard of the Pythagorean theorem, that the
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
by Joseph Campbell · 14 Apr 2004
MUNOMYTH THE HERO AND THE GOD imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike. • 3 • The Hero and the God The standard path of the mythological adventure
Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco · 15 Dec 1990 · 948pp · 214,109 words
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
by Iain McGilchrist · 8 Oct 2012
The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI
by Edward Dolnick · 8 Feb 2011 · 439pp · 104,154 words
Europe: A History
by Norman Davies · 1 Jan 1996
The Planets
by Dava Sobel · 1 Jan 2005 · 190pp · 52,570 words
Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio · 6 Jan 2009 · 315pp · 93,628 words
Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz · 31 Mar 2019 · 407pp · 116,726 words
The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number
by Mario Livio · 23 Sep 2003
Foundation and Empire
by Isaac Asimov · 31 May 2004
Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins · 7 Aug 2011 · 339pp · 112,979 words
The Quantum Thief
by Hannu Rajaniemi · 1 Jan 2010 · 324pp · 91,653 words
Galileo's Dream
by Kim Stanley Robinson · 29 Dec 2009 · 615pp · 189,720 words
The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era
by Craig Nelson · 25 Mar 2014 · 684pp · 188,584 words
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars
by Nathalia Holt · 4 Apr 2016 · 288pp · 92,175 words
The Age of Wonder
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Braiding Sweetgrass
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately · 30 Jun 2008 · 686pp · 201,972 words
The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant · 23 Jul 2012 · 685pp · 203,431 words
The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
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Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air
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The Simple Living Guide
by Janet Luhrs · 1 Apr 2014
Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson · 6 Aug 2012 · 335pp · 107,779 words
The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think
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The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk · 2 Jan 2005 · 1,800pp · 596,972 words
The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe · 1 Jan 1979 · 417pp · 147,682 words
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
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Frommer's Paris 2013
by Kate van Der Boogert · 24 Sep 2012
QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance)
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The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H. W. Brands · 1 Jan 2000 · 961pp · 302,613 words
Redrobe
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood · 1 Jan 2000 · 398pp · 109,479 words
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing · 6 May 2008 · 484pp · 131,168 words
The Music of the Primes
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Business Lessons From a Radical Industrialist
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Pashazade
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Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander · 1 Jan 1977
New York 2140
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Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal · 21 Feb 2017 · 407pp · 90,238 words