![]() It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Harmony of the World - the 1619 book in which he formulated his third and final law of planetary motion, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. He called it music of the spheres - the idea that every celestial body produces in its movement a unique hum determined by its orbit. ![]() Its beauty so staggered him that he thought the entire universe must be governed by it. That is what Pythagoras, too, wondered when he laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the mathematics of harmony. I remember wondering as I sang whether music is something we make or something we are made of. I remember my awe at learning that across centuries of warring nationalisms, this piece of music, based on an old Schiller poem and born of Beethoven’s unimaginable trials, had become the official Hymn of Europe - a bridge of harmony across human divides. I remember singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the choir of the Bulgarian Math Academy as a child. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from a previous season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the antidote to our existential helplessness. The seventh annual Universe in Verse - a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry - occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive.Įuclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,Īt 7PM EST on April 7, tune into the livestream of the 2024 Universe in Verse, celebrating the science and wonder of eclipses, to hear Nick tell the ecliptic story of marrying the love of his life, alongside a constellation of other dazzling humans bringing to life the science of gravity and relativity, tides and black holes, the formation of the Moon and the chemistry of the Sun, through poems and stories that help us meet reality on its own terms and broaden the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.Ĭouple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet. How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?
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