[Aiwendil]

Lyta Underhill wrote:

The art in science to me lies in the description, the elucidation, the mathematics, if you will. Certainly it behaves according to strict laws, but these laws are ever changing, ever being refined.

Science behaves in accordance with one very strict law: all that it is about is describing and predicting data. This is a very rigorous and very rigid definition, which is of course nothing like the definition of art (whatever that might be). I don't think the purpose of science ever changes.

That, to me, is an art, even though its roots are strictly governed by mathematics (in itself an exercise in aesthetics

I certainly appreciate the aesthetic appeal of mathematics (though when I'm embroiled in the depths of, say, a complicated partial differential equation, I must confess that the aesthetic appeal is rather lost on me). But are you really prepared to say that mathematics is aesthetics? Surely aesthetics depends upon the peculiar structure of the human brain, not just upon the logical structure of the world.

But I'm not even sure what we're arguing about any longer. The original discussion involved the possibility of some kind of meaningful connection between the music of the Ainur and the vibrations of superstrings in the early universe. I stand by my opinion that such connections are nothing more than coincidents.

One could make this claim, although it would be out of the mainstream. But, if one's tastes ran to an evening's contemplation of elegant equations rather than a good story, then one could call it literature.

Certainly one could say that one enjoyed it - but would it really be correct to call it "literature"? Admittedly, as I pointed out elsewhere recently, all definitions are arbitrary. So one can certainly call it "literature" if one likes, as long as one adopts a certain definition for "literature". But I don't think that this would be the usual way in which the term is used. "Literature" as an art form seems to me to be something quite different from equations.

I do not mean to say that they are literally scientists of different disciplines and they are translating equations, but that each one's part in the Music is analogous
to the specialist in a particular overreaching field, such as physics as a whole is. It is not a literal comparison but an analogy.

I agree with the analogy, as far as it seems to me to go.

Indeed how can one assume that this music is literally related to our own understanding of what is traditionally known as music?

That's an interesting question. But I am of the opinion that in reading the Ainulindale, we are to think of "music" as we know it - traditional music, even, probably, western music. The evidence for this view is by no means conclusive. But it seems to me that since the Silmarillion is already a myth, it isn't quite right to hyper-mythologize, as it were, a certain portion of it. In other words, why should we take the Ainulindale specifically as being any less "true" than the other, also clearly mythological, tales? Note also that the song of the Ainur is explicitly compared with the music of "harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and . . . countless choirs singing with words". And it is at least suggested that some echo of the music of the Ainur survives in the sound of water, and that there is an association for the Elves between song and water.

physics is the uncovering of the ever-present nature of the Universe, which was there long before anyone arose to attempt its description. I've also been known to espouse the view that the very behavior of the Universe is influenced by our attempts to view it, keeping a complete explanation, in effect, just out of reach in some cases.

Forgive me for veering slightly off the topic, but these two views sound contradictory. The first view, that physics exists to be discovered, seems to me to be the very opposite of the rather constructivist view that the rules change in response to how we go about investigating them.

Thanks for a lively discussion, Aiwendil! Always a pleasure!

I've enjoyed it as well.

Amarie wrote:

how it is possible to sing without time? Music, at least, the kind of music we can understand, needs time to be produced.

To which Lyta Underhill replied:

Perhaps this would speak to the Music being fundamentally different from music as we understand it then? Or perhaps we simply cannot imagine music without meter. In a way, I believe it would be so overwhelming, with the themes rising and falling and interweaving all together, that a mere mortal such as myself could not bear to 'hear' it in its fullness.

If there were truly no time, music would be impossible, for sound would be impossible.

Tolkien does call Iluvatar's dwelling the "Timeless Halls", but like most fictional depictions of supposedly timeless places or people, it has time quite distinctly built into it. Without time there can be no creation, for that implies the existence at one time of a thing that did not exist at another. There can be no seeking for the Secret Fire alone in the void, no speech, no "at first" or "then" (words which are used in the Ainulindale), etc.