mj"Sounds can shed more light on #Philosophy than any other quality, which is why the #science of #Music should not be neglected even if all singing and playing were completely abolished and forbidden."
Marin Mersenne (1636)
A Catholic priest, polymath, prodigious writer, "father of acoustics"...
Possibly 1st to conceive of "TL;DR" by including a 2 page summary of his 1500 page tomb on music theory "Harmonie Universelle."
In keeping with Arnold's principle (aka Stigler's law), he gets credit for improving someone else's work (Vincenzo Galilei) on the #nonlinearity of the spacetime interval.
More specifically, Vincenzo Galilei demonstrated w/experiments that the long held belief that string lengths & tones do not always have a linear relation.
Writing on this from #Pythagoras misinformed all studies from ~600 BC to ~1600. That's a lot of momentum!
Mersenne reproduced & improved on it.
This 'momentum' is seen as culture, norms, etc.
They do indeed influence the progress of #Science.
OTOH, the practice of 'pure' science or #math is not to be messed with. We need the chaos & diversity in order to source new, innovative ideas.
So we keep tinkering w/ this.
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The common thread through these posts is the Renaissance & evolution of "Science: the Institution" that arose w/the decentralization of #knowledge as the printing press churned out books, journals, magazines, daily news, etc & allowed participants to become interactive co-producers of shared method.
Mind you, the participants were largely aristocratic #elites, so this was a limited entry club & outsiders rare. This is a period when these elites were trusted as #gatekeepers & intermediaries. They self-funded & peer reviewed each other w/passioned polemic debates & reputation/ego management.
The #scientific-method that was forming placed more emphasis on replication by peers, through more reliance on mathematization & testable experimentation and demonstration.
The field of #Music was no different, but it also had models from a large # of specialists w/1000s of yrs of trial & error.
These are the roots of what we call Science today.
#Revolutions punctuate the typical incline of growth, & at each one of these we find music playing a lead role in the story.
In large part due to its incorporation of the human mind's measurements & nonlinear #emergence.
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A cluster of historic scientific contributions were to come from the interactions of the people mentioned above (+a few).
Galilean velocity / transform, Newtonian Time & Space..
From our vantage point, we know that there was still a very important chapter to be written regarding #relativity here.