Science and Music was published by Cambridge University Press in 1937, and it represents Jeans’s most personal work of popular science — a book that combines his professional expertise in physics with his lifelong passion for music. Jeans was an accomplished organist who owned a large pipe organ, and the book reflects genuine musical knowledge as well as scientific understanding.
The book covers the physics of sound (wave motion, frequency, amplitude), the nature of musical intervals and harmony (why some combinations of tones sound pleasant and others harsh), the acoustics of musical instruments (how strings, pipes, and resonators produce their characteristic sounds), and the physics of concert halls (how room geometry affects what listeners hear). Throughout, Jeans explains the science clearly while never losing sight of the aesthetic dimension — the fact that music is experienced as beauty, not as physics.
Jeans’s central insight is that the mathematical relationships that govern musical harmony are the same relationships that appear throughout physics: ratios of small whole numbers, periodic functions, resonance phenomena. Music, he suggests, is the art form most directly connected to mathematical structure — and our aesthetic response to harmony is a response to mathematical beauty perceived through the ear rather than through the intellect.
Collecting Science and Music
First edition (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1937): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Without jacket: $8–$20