My office was packed to its full capacity during today’s meeting of my research group. Since the Galileo Project’s observatory images the full sky in infrared light, I asked my students and postdocs: “who discovered infrared radiation?”
The discoverer was the celebrated astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822), who also discovered Uranus and Saturn’s Moons, Enceladus and Mimas. My follow-up question was: “what else is Herschel known for” The silence that filled the room was broken by my answer: “Herschel was an accomplished music composer.”
Nature’s splendor can be described succinctly by both art and science. Therefore, science can inspire art and art can inspire science. They complement each other as condensed summaries of nature.
Herschel regarded music as one of four liberal arts, alongside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. A year after his discovery of Uranus on March 13, 1781, King George III offered Herschel the title of “the King’s Astronomer” which shifted his focus from music to Astronomy.
The reason I had mentioned Herschel is because of two special guests who visited my group meeting: the cellists Jeremy Lamb and Sarah Markle. Four years ago, Jeremy was inspired by my scientific research and composed a beautiful piece of music for two cellos and bass, titled: “A Ride On ‘Oumuamua”, which was first performed by Jeremy alongside Sarah and her husband Taddes Korris. The piece was later expanded by Jeremy to include more instruments, and was performed twice by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra in May 2024.
What was the science behind Jeremy’s art? The interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was first spotted by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii on October 19, 2017. The object was moving too fast to be bound to the solar system. `Oumuamua was different from familiar solar system rocks. It was inferred to possess an extreme shape based on the variation of its brightness by an order of magnitude as it was tumbling every 8 hours. The best fit to the large variations in reflected sunlight suggested a flat shape, like a pancake. In addition, `Oumuamua was pushed away from the Sun by a mysterious non-gravitational force without showing signs of cometary evaporation. It also entered the Solar system while being nearly at rest in the Local Standard of Rest, the frame of reference of the Milky-Way galaxy, derived by averaging over the random motions of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun. In that frame, 99.8% of the stars move faster than `Oumuamua was relative to it. The amount of sunlight reflected from `Oumuamua implied that its size was comparable to a football field, about a hundred meters. I suggested in a paper that it may have been a piece of a broken Dyson sphere or some other thin layer produced technologically. This would explain the non-gravitational push as the result of reflection of sunlight because the object was thin, just like NASA’s rocket booster 2020 SO which was discovered unexpectedly by Pan-STARRS on September 17, 2020 and exhibited a push away from the Sun because its thin walls reflected sunlight.
We started the group meeting by listening to “A Ride On ‘Oumuamua” and then I asked Jeremy to explain what inspired him to write this beautiful piece. Jeremy explained that `Oumuamua triggered a sense of loneliness and longing which he translated to music. He then wondered what inspires scientists to do their work.
I explained that the beauty of science is in translating a large set of data about nature into a compact set of fundamental principles and equations. Understanding nature allows us to harness its powers which far exceed our own. Once we understand the physical reality, we can use it to satisfy our needs and wishes. The application of this understanding into technologies improves our quality of life. The well-being of a common person today is far better than that of the wealthiest people who lived centuries ago, thanks to modern technologies and medicine. Scientists figure out the laws of nature as spectators watching the moves on a chess board, figuring out the rules of the game. Playing according to these rules improves our chances to win the game with much better chances than those of an ignoramus.
It is remarkable that the rules we uncover in our terrestrial laboratories apply to the Universe at large, explaining the extreme conditions in the interiors of stars or even the early universe when the first stars and galaxies formed.
Jeremy brought a bottle of expensive champagne to celebrate the recent funding opportunities that I had received towards the Galileo Project’s expedition to retrieve large pieces of the interstellar meteor, IM1. I suggested IM1 as a subject for Jeremy’s next composition. The meteor burned up in the lower atmosphere in three loud detonations, which can be replicated as three dramatic drum beats at the end of the composition. In addition, starting in 2025 the Rubin Observatory in Chile might discover many more `Oumuamua-like objects, which could inspire other music compositions, unless our sense of loneliness will be removed by the abundant visits from interstellar space.
Also this morning, I had received an email from the composer David Ibbett who wrote:
“Dear Avi,
I hope you are having a wonderful summer. I’m writing to ask if you have time for a conversation on the evolution of the 21-cm hydrogen signal. My central project … is the composition of Webb Symphony: The First Billion Years — a planetarium symphony that charts the story of the early universe through a variety of sonifications. In its final form, the piece will premiere at the Museum of Science planetarium before a national tour… I am now composing the 3rd movement — The Cosmic Fugue — which deals with the assembly of the first galaxies and reionization. In order to tell this story with data, I would like to sonify the evolution of the 21-cm hydrogen signal, in particular, the simulation from your textbook `The First Galaxies in the Universe’…
Thanks so much for all your inspiration…
David”
Since David was piano teacher of one of my daughters a decade ago, I agreed wholeheartedly to help him. Here’s hoping that the harmony of the heavens will bring harmony to Earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. His new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2023.
