The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common

Sci­en­tists need hob­bies. The gru­el­ing work of nav­i­gat­ing com­plex the­o­ry and the pol­i­tics of acad­e­mia can get to a per­son, even one as laid back as Dart­mouth pro­fes­sor and astro­physi­cist Stephon Alexan­der. So Alexan­der plays the sax­o­phone, though at this point it may not be accu­rate to call his avo­ca­tion a spare time pur­suit, since John Coltrane has become as impor­tant to him as Ein­stein, Kepler, and New­ton.

Coltrane, he says in a 7‑minute TED talk above, “changed my whole research direc­tion… led to basi­cal­ly a dis­cov­ery in physics.” Alexan­der then pro­ceeds to play the famil­iar open­ing bars of “Giant Steps.” He’s no Coltrane, but he is a very cre­ative thinker whose love of jazz has giv­en him a unique per­spec­tive on the­o­ret­i­cal physics, one he shares, it turns out, with both Ein­stein and Coltrane, both of whom saw music and physics as intu­itive, impro­visato­ry pur­suits.

Alexan­der describes his jazz epiphany as occa­sioned by a com­plex dia­gram Coltrane gave leg­endary jazz musi­cian and Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts pro­fes­sor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the dia­gram was relat­ed to anoth­er and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed field of study—quantum grav­i­ty,” he writes in a Busi­ness Insid­er essay on his dis­cov­ery, “What I had real­ized… was that the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s the­o­ry was reflect­ed in Coltrane’s dia­gram.”

The the­o­ry might “imme­di­ate­ly sound like untestable pop-phi­los­o­phy,” writes the Cre­ators Project, who show­case Alexander’s physics-inspired musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion with exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­er Rioux (sam­ple below). But his ideas are much more sub­stan­tive, “a com­pelling cross-dis­ci­pli­nary inves­ti­ga­tion,” recent­ly pub­lished in a book titled The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Struc­ture of the Uni­verse.

Alexan­der describes the links between jazz and physics in his TED talk, as well as in the brief Wired video fur­ther up. “One con­nec­tion,” he says, is “the mys­te­ri­ous way that quan­tum par­ti­cles move.… Accord­ing to the rules of quan­tum mechan­ics,” they “will actu­al­ly tra­verse all pos­si­ble paths.” This, Alexan­der says, par­al­lels the way jazz musi­cians impro­vise, play­ing with all pos­si­ble notes in a scale. His own impro­vi­sa­tion­al play­ing, he says, is great­ly enhanced by think­ing about physics. And in this, he’s only fol­low­ing in the giant steps of both of his idols.

It turns out that Coltrane him­self used Einstein’s the­o­ret­i­cal physics to inform his under­stand­ing of jazz com­po­si­tion. As Ben Ratliff reports in Coltrane: The Sto­ry of a Sound, the bril­liant sax­o­phon­ist once deliv­ered to French horn play­er David Amram an “incred­i­ble dis­course about the sym­me­try of the solar sys­tem, talk­ing about black holes in space, and con­stel­la­tions, and the whole struc­ture of the solar sys­tem, and how Ein­stein was able to reduce all of that com­plex­i­ty into some­thing very sim­ple.” Says Amram:

Then he explained to me that he was try­ing to do some­thing like that in music, some­thing that came from nat­ur­al sources, the tra­di­tions of the blues and jazz. But there was a whole dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at what was nat­ur­al in music.

This may all sound rather vague and mys­te­ri­ous, but Alexan­der assures us Coltrane’s method is very much like Einstein’s in a way: “Ein­stein is famous for what is per­haps his great­est gift: the abil­i­ty to tran­scend math­e­mat­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions with phys­i­cal intu­ition. He would impro­vise using what he called gedanken­ex­per­i­ments (Ger­man for thought exper­i­ments), which pro­vid­ed him with a men­tal pic­ture of the out­come of exper­i­ments no one could per­form.”

Ein­stein was also a musi­cian—as we’ve not­ed before—who played the vio­lin and piano and whose admi­ra­tion for Mozart inspired his the­o­ret­i­cal work. “Ein­stein used math­e­mat­i­cal rig­or,” writes Alexan­der, as much as he used “cre­ativ­i­ty and intu­ition. He was an impro­vis­er at heart, just like his hero, Mozart.” Alexan­der has fol­lowed suit, see­ing in the 1967 “Coltrane Man­dala” the idea that “impro­vi­sa­tion is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of both music and physics.” Coltrane “was a musi­cal inno­va­tor, with physics at his fin­ger­tips,” and “Ein­stein was an inno­va­tor in physics, with music at his fin­ger­tips.”

Alexan­der gets into a few more specifics in his longer TEDx talk above, begin­ning with some per­son­al back­ground on how he first came to under­stand physics as an intu­itive dis­ci­pline close­ly linked with music. For the real meat of his argu­ment, you’ll like­ly want to read his book, high­ly praised by Nobel-win­ning physi­cist Leon Coop­er, futur­is­tic com­pos­er Bri­an Eno, and many more bril­liant minds in both music and sci­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

CERN’s Cos­mic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Togeth­er at The Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness