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Newton's Unifying View of Nature and the Musical Analogies
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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The belief that music embodies the mathematical principles of nature belongs to the old tradition of Western culture. In this tradition originated in the Pythagorean school, music was a branch of science and held a place among the quadrivium beside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy until the 17th century of the Scientific Revolution. Music belonged to the research interests of many major scientists of the 17th century. The experimental and scientific inquire into music by Vincenzo and Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne expelled mysticism from traditional music theory and expedited the rationalization of music. On the contrary, Kepler was confronted by a new circumstance in aspect of science and music and tried to reconstruct the doctrine of ‘the music of the spheres’ on the basis of musical polyphony and heliocentric astronomy. Newton interpreted the doctrine of ‘the music of the spheres’ as allegory of the law of universal gravitation. He thought that Pythagoras knew the laws of nature including law of gravitation and wished to hide his knowledge in the musical analogies. According to him, Pythagoras realized through the experiments that for the same pitch the weight fastened to the string was inversely proportional to the square of the length of the string. And he applied the proportion, discovered by means of his experiments, to the heavens and then undetstood that the weights of planets towards the sun were reciprocally as the square of their distance. Newton wished to grant authority of the ancients to the law of gravitation, and tried to justify his unifying view of nature in the Pythagorean viewpoint that music embodied the harmony of the world. This is to be found in the spectrum-scale analogy. He discovered that the spectrum can be divided up into ratios corresponding to those of a musical scale, and thus suggested that harmony between colours may have the same origin as that of musical consonance. Newton believed in a simple, harmonious structure of nature, and that it is embodied in music. This is the significance of the musical analogies in his scientific inquires.
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