This is a beautiful bit from the Long Now Foundation blog about celestial harmonics and a software developer, Howard Arrington, who has used his own software to “visualize the relationship between pairs of planets, producing a series of intriguing geometric mosaics.” The best thing about it is that you can use the software to create you own images too. Here.

 

Harmonic Spheres and the Music of the Cosmos

 

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“In the 6th century BC, Pythagoras developed the science of harmonics. Legend has it that he was inspired by the sounds emanating from a blacksmith’s shop; producing experimental music with hammers and anvils, Pythagoras realized that the relationship between different musical notes can be expressed in the form of simple mathematical ratios.

 

Pythagoras saw in this a fundamental theory of the universe, and redefined the world – from the motion of celestial bodies to the emotional fluctuations in a human body – as iterations of a kind of cosmic music. More than a millennium later, Johannes Kepler interpreted this musica universalis as proof of Divine splendor, and devoted his career to a description of the geometric and harmonic order of our solar system….”

 

For the rest visit the Blog of the Long Now.

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