I came across a powerful analogy, I was listening to a discussion a series of talk called “Conversation on the Nature of Reality” from the New York Academy of Sciences. The whole point of this talk is understanding the meaning of mathematics in society, is mathematic constructed or is it discovered. This is an age old puzzle, where do insight in the nature of things come from explained by the workings of mathematic coming from intuition, visualization in the mind the mathematician, and then laid out in formulas, which make sense to only a few.

We are blind to these insight, it is we cannot see them. We go through the world with the perceptions that we need to go on our daily musings, sure our life has been improved by our deepening understanding of the mysteries of nature. But how to understand this process, how make us un-initiated imagine what is going on.

An attempt at an explanation was proposed by theoretical physicist S. James Gates Jr. during that aforementioned discussion, and it is one that us musicians can have a particular advantage in understanding. Imagine a world without sound, not that it cannot exist, but that it has not been experienced yet. Some of the inhabitants of this far away world, who are like us thinking beings who share our ability to imagine, start to hear in their minds ear sound, not unlike when composing music earthlings hear it first in their mind before putting it down to paper, and by reflecting on their insight find a way to write musical scores to describe what their intuition has lead them to discover. To anyone else these “scores” mean nothing, they question the “musicians” what do they mean, and how did they came up with these notions, they ask does music exists as a separate physical fact and they are discovering it, or do the musicians are constructing it?

These same questions arise when we think about mathematics: is it there to be discovered or is it a construct of the rational mind as an attempt at understanding the physical world? Has music always been there and we are just discovering it, or are we creating it. The link between music and physics started when Pythagoreas  to his own amazement, discovered that the ratios of partials of a tone are whole numbers; 1,2,3,4,5,… In a linear progression.

I find this particular story to be a particularly interesting parallel; the formulas of mathematics are the scores of that mind insight, they are symbolic representation system that describe what we cannot see, hear or touch: mathematics. The same thing applies to music: we could not see, hear or touch music in a world without sound.

This also leads us to a fascinating conclusion as the other participant in the discussion science writer Margaret Wertheim, pointed out: by inverting the argument we can say: scoring music is only one way we can learn and appreciate music, there are countless musicians throughout history that do not read music, so if the parallel holds between mathematic and music understanding the equations should not be a prerequisite to understanding mathematics, and that brings us to the conclusion that as music mathematics can be understood intuitively.

Of course this is a “thought experiment”, it would be hard to find a world without this very important physical element. But it might be that this world is just space, like the one that separates us with the rest of the universe, and in interstellar space there is no medium, so no sound.

Here is a YouTube link to: The Mystery of Our Mathematical Universe