1 thought on “Saturday Morning Physics with Philip Glass”

1. Interesting talk, although it didn’t really get into the subject of Einstein as a cultural icon (beyond Glass’ recollection of his post-war celebrity status). I’ve often felt that Glass’ music describes the warping of time beautifully, just listen to ‘Trial 1’ from ‘Einstein on the Beach’; as the repeating phrases grow and diminish there’s a sense of the expansion and contraction of time itself. Of course, Glass’ musical language was already well developed by the time he composed ‘Einstein on the Beach’ so it was probably merely serendipitous that it turned out to be so adept at describing Einsteinian time dilation! I’ve also often felt that in some of his pieces there’s a quality akin to Fourier Transform in the rhythmic structure of Glass’ music; complex patterns built up out of layering simple sine waves of differing frequencies and amplitudes.

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