PITHAGORAS WAVES

[In grateful (but dubious) honor of the centennial of Einstein's miraculous year.]

I don't know how to tell you this. You probably don't even remember the names, let alone the dudes themselves. But let's give it a try.

When Jerry Garcia died, his soul migrated to me. What can I say? There was a vacancy. Not that I'm complaining. I'm a much better musician now than I was before. I just wish I didn't have to waste so much time hunting around for tie dyed T's.

So anyway, I'm sitting in the ‘Bucks sipping a latte. I hate lattes, but like I said, there are the plusses and the minuses. And this guy walks in. He's got a real funny look on his face, like he's disoriented. He asks the lady for a wine and water. Back and forth they go, and he settles for a cappuccino. Over to my table he comes. Sits. Stares into his fuzz. Nothing.

I hear myself say “Hi. I'm Jerry Garcia.

“That's funny,” he says, “You don't look Mexican.” I tell him it's a long story. “And what's your name?”

“Pithagoras,” he says, and I say “Funny. You don't look Greek.”

“That's an even longer story than yours.” He says. “And anyway, my mother was Italian.”

JG: Well, if you're Pithagoras, you're a musician like me.

Pi: Not really. I thought about it, though.

JG: Aw come on, man, everybody knows you were the one who figured out about chords.

Pi: That's “cords.”

JG: Strings. Right. I play bass. Or at least I did. This guy …

Pi: So you're an expert on strings too!

JG: Well, only on modern ones. I can't even handle the old double bass, man.

Pi: Yes, yes! But I came here looking for an expert on strings. I heard that after all these millennia, my game was being played again. I'm back in fashion.

JG: Well, I wouldn't say those bellbottoms you're wearing cut it.

Pi: Bells are what I do. I'm sorry. But let's stay with strings.

JG: Whoa, man. That sounds like bad vibes. You gonna hit me with violins and shit? The music of the squares?

Pi: Spheres, not squares. The modern string experts seem to be searching for what I sought all those millennia ago. But do you have a stringed instrument with you? We can begin by reviewing the great discoveries of the past.

JG: Well, I've got my bass: bass guitar, really. Let me get it out.

Pi: How extraordinary! Is that umbilicus connected to an omphalos?

JG: Aw come on, dude. It's connected to the fucking amp.

Pi: You don't have to be crude. But what are those little metal bars doing beneath the strings?

JG: Those are frets. They're so you play the right notes. On a stand-up bass there's no frets, so you get a little juiced you end up playing all kinds of crap. A real drag.

Pi: Ah. But conversely, because of the frets there are many tones that you can't produce. The frets forbid them.

JG: Fuckin' A, man. That's why recording sessions don't take forever.

Pi: You must see, though, that the significance of the right notes depends upon the potential presence of the wrong notes. The right notes are simply the privileged tones in the continuum of all notes. What I and my colleagues found, those many years ago, was that the continuum of tones was the direct analogue of the continuum of positions on the taut string. Privileged distances produced harmonies, but how can there be distances without anything in between.

JG: Far out. Say, how many tones do you think there are between the right notes. Shit, man, think of how many keys there could be.

Pi: Oh no. One of your savants of the last century showed us all that there was only one key. C. All other keys are transformations of C. E, for example, …

JG: Big fucking deal. That's for real squares. I still had to play sharps and flats. That, my friend, is why it's real handy to have frets.

Pi: All right. But I do wish you would watch your language. Would that you had frets that forbade bad words and allowed only the good. However, let's explore the mythic possibilities of, oh, superfrets. Let's call it the myth of error. In it we imagine a world in which the only notes that could be sounded (and the only notes that could be heard) are the right notes. People have theories and legends of wrong notes, of course. They use the stories to frighten their children into behaving well. But the wrong notes are never sounded or heard, so very soon children simply make a game of them, simulating them with rude noises in order to annoy their parents. They all know in their hearts that sweet notes are real, and sour notes are myth. Intelligent people dismiss the myths and embrace the sweetness of the harmonies. Disharmony is a lie.

JG: How in hell does anybody ever learn to play music, then. They get it right the first time?

Pi: Oh really, now! Pay attention! The learner picks up the instrument and tries to play. If she does what she ought, all the fingers in the right place, and so on, then indeed, she gets it right the first time. But in the usual case all does not go well, and in that case no sound is produced . Bad sounds are definitively forbidden. Some learners try for years without producing a sound. For French Horn players it can be a matter of decades. But in compensation they have more friends than they do in our world: live more in harmony with their families. Others have frets – or white keys and black keys. They play instruments that honor the myth of error.

JG: Well, now you're on my side. What are you going to do with your shit about lengths and tones? If there's nothing between the good tones, they must be next to one another, and there goes your length.

Pi: Well, people these days have found some new ways to think about lengths and distances. But first you have to remember that the important part of comparing length to tone was to find ratios. There may be trouble with length in the myth of error, but there could be other ratios to take their place. For instance, suppose absolutely everything was humming along: everything had its tone. Then some things would be humming at one tone, and other things humming along at other tones – call them pitches if you want. You could think of the various tones measuring each other. Tones at the same pitch, or at harmonics of the same pitch, might give out a big hum when they got together; other combinations of tones might do something else, like blot each other out. Now these new string experts, for instance, seem to talk about that. They're the people who got me here, and I haven't had time to really understand what they're saying. They talk in a mathematics that's way beyond what I learned (and made up). But if I follow their thread at all, I think they're saying that the strings that matter for all this are very very small – unimaginably small, to my lights, but my lights may be dim. There are many different ways they can hum. Anything that can be detected in any way (so far) is the result of them humming along together in one of those ways.

JG: That is just fucking hard to believe, dude. And if you've got e-mail then every fucking loony on the planet's going to land on you like flies on spam.

Pi: Well, even before they got down to the little strings they'd already found out some pretty strange things about the humming of light, electrons and such – much bigger than the little strings, but still incredibly small. Light, for instance is all vibes. If you look at it one way it looks like a stream of little particles, and if you look at it another way you see the vibes. But you can't see it both ways at once.

JG Didn't some very heavy dudes get seriously bent out of shape by that?

Pi: The heaviest. And there are still many folks ringing their hands about it. I'm not sure I can see why. People are doing incredible things at the level of the very very small: figuring out why things stick together, building tiny little devices, finding one technological opportunity after another. So they've definitely got things right in an obvious way. Sailing right along using what they know. I think that the airier theorists don't want to believe their eyes, sometimes, though.

JG: I've got the same problem. If I look at my cat when he's not looking at me everything's cool. But if he looks back he thinks I want to pet him, and he won't let me alone.

Pi: Well, cats have always been a problem, but I don't want to get into that yet. Play something for me on your marvelous modern strings.

JG: OK, but it will sound like shit if I don't tune up first.

Pi: Tuning. Ah yes. The secret of it all, I think. To what do you tune?

JG: To a cup of coffee and a cigarette, ace. Do you see a keyboard player around? Or do you fart in perfect pitch? Blow me an A.

Pi: Please. That sort of talk is beneath me. Tuning shouldn't be taken lightly. Think what your TV would be like if you couldn't tune to precise frequencies: lock into them, and lock out the others. Just consider how many possible electronic signals there are ready and waiting at your antenna. Or do you call them to you when you tune to them? This is as mysterious a puzzle about where things are as any the physicists of the very small can set. If all those signals are always there, how do they all fit together in such a small place – in fact, in every small space. And if you call them up when you tune them in, how do you call? Where are they when they get the call?

JG: Maybe they have a cell phone.

Pi: Cell phones are surely just another part of the mystery, the mystery of tuned channels.

JG: Watch out with that channel and Shirley talk. Remember how I make the scene these days. You start screwing around with Shirley, I could be in deep shit. And it seems to me you're playing out the same string.

Pi: Indeed. But I had to come. How could I not want to see and try to understand all the marvelous advances in tuning and detecting. My own speculations about the music of the spheres fades into insignificance in the presence of the symphony of spins and resonances currently being played in laboratories everywhere. And the drama of it! Can there be detectors to detect every vibe?

JG: Well, you already told me that things are tangled up so sometimes if you detect one vibe you screw up your chance to detect another one. And if everything depends on detecting each others' vibes, then … Oh balls, I forgot what I was gonna say.

Pi: Perhaps you were going to speculate that this universe – at least insofar as it's detectable – consists of all those things that are so tuned that they can detect one another. Or, as we said before, it's made up of all the harmonies, and none of the disharmonies. But alas, there are problems. When they add up all the weight in the universe, all the weight that needs to be in order to account for the motions of what we can detect, they find that the weight of what we can detect falls far short of the needed total. They're currently in the dark about what might make up the difference. What's more, the universe is getting bigger at a faster and faster rate, it seems, and when they look for the energy causing that speed-up they're again in the dark.

JG: I had an acid flashback like that once. I know what you mean by being in the dark.

Pi: Of course there are the discordant tones. Maybe the undetectable dark matter and dark energy are the tones that are necessary to create the distances between the tones we hear.

JG: Whoa. This is getting weird. Do you really think the world's like that?

Pi. How the fuck should I know?