Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm sorry to report that this book really let me down. The subtitle of this book is "the secret link between music and the structure of the universe" and I was hoping for some good, illuminating analogies. (I teach a course in relativity so I am not coming at this as a total novice) Unfortunately, the author's analogies are strained and forced, and left me with nothing I could use with my own students. This book is much more of personal narrative of what jazz has meant to the author as a scientist, and what science has meant to the author as a musician, as inspiration and muse going both directions. Fair enough; I have had many of the same inspirations. It contains lots and lots of the first person; stories about his youth, encounters with other musicians and scientists, his journey, and his love for the topics, etc. Also fair enough, and occasionally interesting to me. But his scientific explanations leave a lot out - he often lurches into advanced concepts without sufficient preamble for the beginner. On the other hand his analogies between the two disciplines often come out of left field - "in his song 'Jupiter' one can hear John Coltrane literally channelling Jupiter's moons in his improvisation." At best this comes across as drunken late-night fan-boy-ism, and at worst it can verge on paranoid-schizophrenic ramblings. Coltrane may have been inspired by Einstein, but did he "correctly realized that the expansion [of the universe] is a form of anti-gravity"? Absolutely not. No way. This sort of thing has been done much more elegantly and inspirationally. I can recommend the classic pulitzer prize winer "Escher, Godel, Bach" by Douglas Hofstader, which uses the music of Bach to illuminate logical, mathematical, and scientific themes. I can also recommend the somewhat more advanced "Quantum Reality" by Nick Herbert which has about the best layman's explanation of wave/particle duality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principal I have ever encountered, using sound waves. It's not poetry and there is no reference to Jazz, but you might actually gain some understanding of quantum weirdness. Finally, the most frustrating part of this kind of analysis, is that authors who press and strain analogues between fields, like Alexander has done with Jazz, or like Zukav did with science and Eastern Philosophy in "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", are overlooking a central idea. These analogies expose more about the human brain than about the erstwhile topics at hand. Human beings have finite brains which process the world in a limited set of modes. Saying that Coltrane somehow explains Einstein or vice-versa is in fact a trivial statement of the obvious. As if a computer noticed that "hey, Picasso and Isaac Newton are both expressed in binary code!!" Of course they are, silly, because that's the language your brain speaks.