Rachmaninoff plays Chopin Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music.
I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music …. I get most joy in life out of music.”~Albert Einstein
What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,
for the October 26, 1929 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.“The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man”
~Albert Einstein
“Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium”
published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion
in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1941(When asked about his theory of relativity)
“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition.
My discovery was the result of musical perception.”
~Albert Einstein
Music has meaning in a world designed by God, it has no meaning in the world of Darwin. Sometimes my best argument for Intelligent Design is to appeal to the intution. People who can appreciate the genius of Chopin intuitively know that something more than material subtances trancends reality.
I was a music student before I began my studies in science. In fact in 1993, I studied at Peabody Preparatory (JHU’s prep school) under concert pianist Paul Maillet.
I have been amazed how many math and physics students are also accomplished musicians. Neuroscientists have said musicians, software developers, mathematicians, and physicists have measuarably similar electrical activity in their brain.
For the reader’s appreciation of the world made by Intelligent Design, here is a remarkably rare recording of one great composer playing the works of another great composer. Sergei Rachmaninoff performs my favorite Chopin Nocturne.
Einstein was a musician, a violinist and performed in at least one concert as I recall. He recalled how neither religious fanatics or atheists were able to hear what he called “the music of the spheres.” Einstein remains my favorite intellectual in spite of his life long determinism which I have come to accept without qualification. If there really was such a thing as Free Will, atheists like P.Z. Myers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins could not possibly exist. I am convinced they were as the titles of William Wright’s book claims, Born That Way. I am deadly serious.
Comment by John A. Davison — January 26, 2008 @ 8:48 pm
Rachmaninoff had enormous hands which could span a twelfth. His protoge Vladimir Horowitz was probably the greatest virtuoso of all time and incidentally a homosexual. I too am an amateur musician and regard music as essential to a complete life. Unfortunately, I now cannot hear the top ten notes of the piano keyboard and great silent gaps appear in violin cadenzas, an interesting feature of advancing age. I lose about a note per year.
I have also expressed elsewhere that the great composers of the past actually didn’t write their music but were simply the chosen instruments “prescribed” to hear it and transmit it to the rest of us. I think that is especially true of J.S. Bach.
The era of great music, like art and literature, is in the past. We are now witnessing the terminal dregs of a degenerating society as man, the final product of a planned evolution, seems to be bent on his own destruction. Homo sapiens is apparently the last mammal ever to appear and very possibly the one with the shortest life span.
I do not see Western Civilization surviving the present century. I have a thread on my blog dedicated to anthropogenic global warming which I regard as an ominous threat to our survival.
There are times when I feel evolution was a giant cosmic joke! You may quote me. No one else will! Prediction is an essential feature of the scientific process. It is also great fun.
“Everything is determined…by forces over which we have no control.”
Albert Einstein
“A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable.”
john.a.davison.free.fr/
Comment by John A. Davison — January 27, 2008 @ 2:23 am
[…] BFF and partner in slime, Salvador Cordova, recently posted some idiotic crap about how “Darwinists” can’t appreciate music. Maybe, just maybe, if God was sitting in with Jeremy Camp and throwing down some nasty guitar […]
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