In ancient times Pythagoras described the sound of the cosmos as a harmony of the spheres, in relation to the arithmetic composition of the cosmos. He felt God as a Master Arithmetist and Geometrist. Johann Sebastian Bach became a master composer, he founded the technique of harmonies in fugues, and we can sense in them an abstract harmony of the spheres. Later, as the composing faculties became more guided by inspired fantasy, Richard Strauss composed a cosmic sound, the rising of the sun. Of course this,too, will not be how the sun sounds in the cosmic spaces, but it is the inspiration of an artist. In words it was said by Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about cosmic sounds in Faust I, Prologue in Heaven:
RAPHAEL
The Sun sings out, in ancient mode,
His note among his brother-spheres,
And ends his pre-determined road,
With peals of thunder for our ears.
The sight of him gives Angels power,
Though none can understand the way:
The inconceivable work is ours,
As bright as on the primal day.
And Richard Strauss in his ‘Sonnenaufgang’:
Then came our technical epoch. Computers can be programmed so that they can transform waves into sounds, making it probable that these sounds really are to be heard in the cosmos – if we could come near to the cosmic processes.
I am not saying that I don’t take this seriously, or that it wouldn’t be interesting information. But we have to remain sober in our thinking and should not forget that these are sounds produced by computers, by an almost endless number of transformational steps; and we should also realise that the perceptive apparatus can only register what it is made for. So it could be that the human ear would hear something quite other than a computer. The human ear is a physically and physiologically perfect and living apparatus that cannot be imitated by science at all. So we have to stay calm and admit that sounds like this from a billion light-years away, and transformed by techniques into an audible sound, certainly would not sound like a trivial chirping ‘ping’. This is all apart from the fact that there is a cosmic sound.
I perceive the cosmos as a big smartphone now, that receives a message and gives note of it by a ‘ping’…
A quote from the New York Times1:
‘A team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More generally, it means that a century of innovation, testing, questioning and plain hard work after Einstein imagined it on paper, scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.’
The quality of Einstein’s predicted waves, as they are described, is very familiar to someone who knows the true nature of human thought: space and time are interwoven, space becomes time and time becomes space,it becomes a dynamic whole, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle…
The macrocosm finds its representation in the human microcosm. Cosmic thoughts are represented in human thoughts – not in the contents of thinking, though, but in the living activity of thinking – in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle…

A black hole
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0
The tree of knowledge – Our wandering away from the Garden of Eden by Mieke Mosmuller



