Food for Thought ~ Music, Science, Math, and Memory

Or “The Cross-Pollination of Accumulated Ideas”

 

:: Music and God’s Good Timing by Caleb Skogen @ Classical Conversations [Seriously good, but convicting, stuff here.]

Music cannot be separated from time nor can the timing of music be thought of as something entirely constructed by man. Because of music’s physical and temporal character, music reminds us that time belongs to the very framework of God’s creation.

:: The Musical Root of Science @ CiRCE

If we wish to produce young men and women who are capable of thinking like Galileo and Kepler, advancing the boundaries of mathematics and science, they must be educated in all areas of study, including music as well as arithmetic, and be able to integrate the disciplines together.

:: A Post-Empirical God @ Church & Culture

There is now a battle raging over the scientific method itself, particularly between those engaged in cosmology and those pursuing the study of fundamental physics.

:: The Psychology of Why Creative Work Hinges on Memory and Connecting the Unrelated @ Brain Pickings

“A powerful and personally developed structuring of information — an active and selective memory — is as necessary for scientists as it is for poets.” [John-Steiner]

But perhaps the most potent use of memory in the creative mind is the cross-pollination of accumulated ideas and the fusing together of seemingly unrelated concepts into novel configurations — something Stephen Jay Gould, arguably the greatest science essayist of all time, captured when he said that his sole talent is “making connections.” John-Steiner quotes a similar sentiment by the Polish-born mathematician Stan Ulam:

“It seems to me that good memory — at least for mathematicians and physicists — forms a large part of their talent. And what we call talent or perhaps genius itself depends to a large extent on the ability to use one’s memory properly to find analogies, past, present and future, which [are] essential to the development of new ideas.”