11/03/2009 – 14h – Auditório Principal, Bloco G – IAG/USP

Dominique Proust

GEPI – Observatório de Paris/Meudon, França

Título/Title: The music of the spheres, from Pythagoras to Voyager II

Resumo/Abstract:

From Pythagoras who tried to find a general theory of the World, until now, many musicians have raised the ideas of the Harmony of the World taking inspiration from the celestial mechanics. Conversely, many astronomers were interested by the musical harmonics relations e.g. the musical scale, to explain the movements of the planets. Through the History, old greeks such as Pythagoras, Platon, Ptolemee, medieval astronomers and neoplatonicians, then Copernic, Kepler, Galilee, explained the universe with a musical, harmonic concept. More recently, the first cosmologists such as William Herschel, until the contemporary period have associated musical (harmonic) principles (e.g. the Bode's law). To-day, the two spacecrafts Voyager transport a videodisk containing Earth musical samples as a universal language with hypothetic extraterrestrial civilizations.

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