The music of the spheres

And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres

-This Is My Father’s World, hymn

Music is mathematical. You hear it instantly when a talented musician opens their mouth to sing, or when they play their instrument. Our brains recognize the consonance when notes are played within the same key. That is because the frequencies of notes in the scale form integer ratios.

Octaves are a 2:1 ratio, thirds are 3:2, fourths are 4:3 and so forth. These combinations of notes are pleasing to the ear.

Integer ratios don’t occur by chance in random noise. We instinctively respond to the intent behind the notes, the intelligence that deliberately put the notes together in that order.

Our brains are wired to look for patterns, though. Even when we hear seemingly random noise, such as these radio emissions from around Jupiter, we can’t help but go looking for those integer ratios and the notes behind them.


But, while Nature may not play the same notes that Bach knew, integers have a surprising way of popping up in nature, if we know where to look.

The Fibonacci Sequence appears often where a swirl is present, such as in the pattern of a snail’s shell, or spiral galaxies, or arrangement of seeds in a plant.

Integers are also found in something called orbital resonance. This is where two satellites have orbital periods that form integer relationships. For instance, the Earth and Moon have a 1:1 relationship. The Moon spins once on its axis for every trip around the Earth. (This is why one side of the Moon always faces the Earth.) Pluto and Neptune have a 2:3 relationship. Heading back to Jupiter, the moons Ganymede, Europa and Io have a 1:2:4 relationship. It’s not exactly magic, it just turns out that these are gravitationally stable orbits.

The heavens sang again last night. It was quite a performance, though, perhaps not surprisingly, not a random one. The interval between successive lunar eclipses can be 1, 5 or 6 lunar months. The music of the spheres indeed. Bravo to the Composer.



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