This was a book that I was looking forward to reading. Two
words caught my fancy: Physics and Jazz.
Alexander is an accomplished physicist and a working
musician. He was fascinated by both parts of his life when he was a child and
managed to be able to do quite well in both spheres as an adult. He was able to
convey his own natural attraction and obsession to both physics and jazz in a
very natural and passionate way. He does an excellent job in eliciting in me a corresponding
response in me that was as natural and passionate as his.
His intent is to present the advanced physics that he is
working on as an academic as being analogous to the jazz improvisations that he
is working on as a gigging jazz musician. Unfortunately, he was much less
successful.
My own expertise in both physics and jazz are skin deep at
best. Physics being more naturally aligned with my engineering training, while jazz
is limited by scant my musical background. So it would seem to be natural that
his explanations of the physics would be easier for me to comprehend, it wasn’t.
In fact the musical analogies that he explained made much more sense that his
explanations of physics. As I slogged
through the explanations, I wondered about the more general audience, whether
they were having as difficult of a time as I was.
The center motif that he presented at the beginning of the
book involved John Coltrane’s mandala in which Coltrane was trying to create a
connection with his own very original musical expressions with the evolution of
modern physics during that time. Coltrane worshiped Einstein and his ideas, for
example. According to Alexander,
Coltrane’s last three albums were his own experimentation with the mathematical
ideas that Einstein had speculated upon.
Taking inspiration from arguably the most prominent minds of
their era, in completely disparate areas of achievement, Alexander decided to
work on both simultaneously. Of course, this was not a conscious choice, he had
been foundering in his physics career since physics had become a calculators
domain with the mathematics heavy emphasis on the superstring theory.
Indeed, Alexander employed the method of no method, or the
idea of wu-wei to use jazz as a means of training his mind in a way that perhaps
the jazz could elicit some original ideas in his physics. By the accounts in
the book, he was indeed successful in doing good physics while also playing
some good jazz. What he failed to do in the book however, was cogently leading
us through his maze of twin spheres of influence and the complexity contained
therein with each one. While he did a very admirable job trying to explain
himself, I suspect that the culprit is more the complexity of the subjects
rather than his familiarity with both subjects. Indeed, the book would be 100 times
longer if he had indeed taken care to explain the minutiae of the two subjects.
His hope of using analogy rather than detailed explanations to convey his
message was somewhat successful but also somewhat a failure. But no matter,
because the book did a great job of creating an ethos of what he was trying to
convey, and there was a denouement of sorts toward the end. I will never listen
to Coltrane again, and I will now understand a little bit better what all the fuss
about modern physics is in regard, so I
can say that I learned something new.
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