Satzgruppe des pythagoras and music

At this point, we have covered a number of topics and some history of physics, so it is important to step back and understand where we are before going on.

Modern physics started in the early ’s with the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity.

However, the concept of quantum mechanics came about through a process much like Pythagoras’s.

Satzgruppe des pythagoras and music

The physicist, Neils Bohr, considered a physical system (the hydrogen atom), examined the frequencies characteristic of hydrogen (i.e. the colors of light that a hydrogen lamp produced), and found simple relationships between the frequencies (such as ratios of 3²/4²).

This process, used by Pythagoras, Bohr and many others, is called spectroscopy (loosely, the study of frequencies) and is at the heart of most modern science.

To better understand it, spectroscopy also forms basis of most of the labs in the course. Indeed, strings and air columns fall into the same process: