"Fascinating details and anecdotes accompany this engaging account of the emergence of dramatic new ideas and forms in music over the centuries..." David Politzer, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. "A thought-provoking, stimulating, and highly original exploration of deep metaphorical links between music and physics...Highly recommended." Prof. Ian Stewart FRS, author, What’s the Use? "An astonishing book!" Tristan Murail, composer and co-creator of the "spectral" technique. Have you ever wondered about the connection between Pauli's exclusion principle and Schoenberg's dodecaphony? Or the symphonic echoes of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in the compositions of Stockhausen and Cage? This book not only poses these questions but skillfully uncovers the artistic answers, exploring interdisciplinary connections that bridge the gap between modern physics and contemporary music. Dive into philosophical discourses on time, witness the metamorphosis of Boolean algebra, bits, and qubits into musical notation, and discover the limitations of the 12-tone scale mirrored in the speed of light. The author's unique methodology offers a fresh perspective, linking the language of mathematics and physics to the creation of musical scores. This book transcends the boundaries of physics and music, revealing the inevitable fusion of modern physics and avant-garde music in the twentieth century. Through meticulous research, the author showcases the profound impact of revolutionary ideas such as quantum physics and relativity on all aspects of life and demonstrates that modern physics and contemporary music were born not out of chance—their emergence and development were inevitable events. Delving into the historical accounts, he explores the musical endeavors of great physicists like Max Planck and Albert Einstein, unraveling the quantum entanglement of physics mirrored in the extended techniques of contemporary music and unveiling the musical universe of Werner Heisenberg through captivating personal encounters with his descendants. Crafted for general readers and seasoned experts alike, the book maintains clarity and style, ensuring accessibility without sacrificing depth. This pioneering exploration not only draws connections between modern physics and music but also serves as a unique bridge for scientists, musicians, and the curious general audience. Requiring no formal background in physics or music, the book is a compelling read for those intrigued by the uncharted territories where science and art converge, offering a concise and illuminating journey into the shadows of the void.

A spectacular musical and scientific journey from the Bronx to the cosmic horizon that reveals the astonishing links between jazz, science, Einstein, and Coltrane More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim — The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the "Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics. The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

In culture and scholarship, science-fictional worlds are perceived as unrealistic and altogether imaginary. Seo-Young Chu offers a bold challenge to this perception of the genre, arguing instead that science fiction is a form of “high-intensity realism” capable of representing non-imaginary objects that elude more traditional, “realist” modes of representation. Powered by lyric forces that allow it to transcend the dichotomy between the literal and the figurative, science fiction has the capacity to accommodate objects of representation that are themselves neither entirely figurative nor entirely literal in nature. Chu explores the globalized world, cyberspace, war trauma, the Korean concept of han, and the rights of robots, all as referents for which she locates science-fictional representations in poems, novels, music, films, visual pieces, and other works ranging within and without previous demarcations of the science fiction genre. In showing the divide between realism and science fiction to be illusory, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? sheds new light on the value of science fiction as an aesthetic and philosophical resource—one that matters more and more as our everyday realities grow increasingly resistant to straightforward representation.

In this encyclopedia, some 200 international scholars in 360 articles explore subjects such as physics, archeostronomy, astronomy, mathematics, time's measurements and divisions, as well as covering other scientific and interdisciplinary areas: biology, economics and political science, horology, history, medicine, geography, geology and telecommunications.

Why do human beings behave the way they do? What governs how they act out their daily lives? It is not difficult to provide the traditional argument that it’s largely a matter of the culture in which we live, a product of the influences of family, peers, teachers, religious leaders, the movies we see, the books we read, and so forth. Such behavior often contradicts the independent nature of the human spirit, demanding a certain compromise—we depend on others for our needs, and to obtain these, we must behave accordingly. Evidence grows, however, that, in addition, much of our behavior has its roots in biological processes. Such information indicates that, whether we like to accept it or not, our conduct is often governed by biochemical agents within in the brain, an expression of our animalistic ancestral past, governed by our genetic inheritance, and all beyond the level of our conscious decision-making. This book addresses a series of such behaviors—love, jealousy, travel, suicide, etc.—and examines new-found perspectives that speak to a biological component in explaining just why we behave as we do. Certainly, such scientific insights are limited and currently provide only a narrow insight into human behavior. However, this information clearly forecasts the coming of a greater appreciation that, as members of the animal kingdom, we remain biological beings as well as members of a cooperative society.

The gripping, entertaining, and vividly-told narrative of a radical discovery that sent shockwaves through the scientific community and forever changed the way we understand the world. Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” challenged centuries of scientific understanding, placed him in direct opposition to Albert Einstein, and put Niels Bohr in the middle of one of the most heated debates in scientific history. Heisenberg’s theorem stated that there were physical limits to what we could know about sub-atomic particles; this “uncertainty” would have shocking implications. In a riveting and lively account, David Lindley captures this critical episode and explains one of the most important scientific discoveries in history, which has since transcended the boundaries of science and influenced everything from literary theory to television.

Depending on their national level of income, development and modernization, all countries in the world can be generally categorized as either advanced or developing. Studies on why advanced countries continue to develop, how they maintain their level of development, and how developing countries enter into the advanced club fall into the field of “modernization science,” which is an emerging interdisciplinary science. This monograph, the first English book available on “modernization science,” interprets its concepts, methodologies, general theories, first and second modernization, six level-specific, six field-specific and three sector-specific modernizations, modernization policy and evaluation, and the principles and methods of national development since the 18th century. It provides clear, systematic, up-to-date information on this new discipline with more than 173 figures and 265 tables, and covers 131 countries and 97% of the global population. A comprehensive outlook on world modernization is presented from a Chinese perspective.

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.