Dancing with the stars

Have you bought your eclipse glasses yet? Since I live about 100 miles from the path of totality, I’m calculating how to get maximum viewing with minimum traffic headaches (and praying for a cloudless day). Aug. 21 will be a once-in-a-lifetime, special-matinee-showing of one of God’s heavenly splendors.

I’ve also been thinking of the days of creation and what was actually taking place under the stately rollout of light, seas, sky, and land. On Day Four, with a “Let there be,” the heavenly bodies appear “for signs and seasons, days and years.” This was not the creation of light, for light was the radiant energy from which God created everything else. Nor time, for time began “In the beginning.” But by setting out planets and stars, God provided the raw material for numbers, measurement, calculation, science—and music.

The “music of the spheres” is more than poetic imagery. Pythagoras, ca. 500 B.C., may have guessed it first. Leader of a cult of mystics on the island of Samos, Pythagoras taught that numbers were the purest form of knowledge and the key to reality. He wasn’t entirely wrong. The scientific revolution, which occurred roughly 2,000 years later, took great strides forward in the seven-league boots of mathematics. But even more intriguing, at least for numerically challenged people like me, were Pythagoras’ experiments with music.

Imagine two lyre strings of equal length. If one is cut to half the length of the other, it will vibrate twice as fast, a ratio of 2-to-1. The two pitches produced are seven full tones apart—an octave (to hear it, hum the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow”). A third string, cut to one-third the length of the original, results in a pitch that vibrates at two-thirds the speed, or a ratio of 3-to-2. Musicians call it a major fifth, and it sounds like the jump between the second and third notes of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” A fourth string cut to one-fourth the length of the original vibrates at a ratio of 4-to-3—a major fourth, like the first three notes of “Taps.”

The fourth, the fifth, and the octave are common intervals in all cultures and all musical traditions. For Pythagoras, their mathematical relationship was a clue that the same relationships occurred in the heavens. He pictured the planets “ascending” from Earth at distinct intervals corresponding to musical pitches. That was why music fed both soul and body; it was part of the stuff we’re made from.

Fast-forward to ca. 1610, when the brilliant astronomer Johannes Kepler was formulating his “laws” proving that planets moved in elliptical orbits, as opposed to the concentric ones proposed by Copernicus. While observing the variations in speed between a planet’s perihelion (when closest to the sun) and aphelion (when farthest away), he made an interesting discovery. Saturn traveled at 135 degrees per solar day at perihelion and 106 degrees at aphelion, a ratio of 135-to-106. After factoring out these numbers, the ratio differs by only two seconds from 5-to-4—the interval, in musical terms, of a major third.

Kepler went on to measure and factor the velocity ratios of all the planets, and discovered that they closely corresponded to musical intervals. When he compared the ratios for combined pairs of planets, such as Jupiter’s perihelion with Mars’ aphelion, he found the intervals of a complete chromatic scale (that is, a 12-tone scale, as if playing the black notes as well as white notes on a piano keyboard). As the planets rolled along their elliptical paths, shifting speed and velocity, they described recognizable patterns, even harmonic chords. “Henceforth,” Kepler wrote, “it is no longer a harmony made for the benefit of our planet, but the song which the cosmos sings to its Lord and center.”

Modern science, while it doesn’t come to the same theological conclusion, still regards Kepler’s measurements to be “frighteningly good,” as noted astronomer Fred Hoyle observed. An eerie coincidence, perhaps—or the recurring melody of “It is good,” with the occasional solar eclipse as a striking variation on a theme.