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Inspired on this post: Who were some mathematicians who have a musical background? I want to now ask if there were any famous physicists who had a particular musical background.
Looking in Google I just got modern names like Brian Cox or Brian May (from Queen), but are there famous historical physicists that had also received formal musical education?
Classical education included music as one of the liberal arts since the times of Plato's Academy, see quadrivium, so most physicists had musical background until the end of 19th century. But there also seems to be something of a general appeal music has for physicists that continues into recent times, see Gold, Is it the mystery, or the structure, or the discipline?
Some prominent examples:
Heisenberg: "Werner Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany, on December 5, 1901, and from birth, he seemed destined to become a concert pianist. With help from his mother, Anna, Werner was reading sheet music by age 4 and conquering the masterworks on the family's piano by the time he was 15. But Heisenberg's musical aspirations were slowly sabotaged by the family's book collection. His father, Albert, was a professor of Greek at the University of Munich, and Werner took a liking to rummaging through his dad's bookshelves. Before long, the young Heisenberg decided he preferred Archimedes to Mozart, and science replaced music as his passion."
Einstein:"It’s little known that Einstein was an accomplished violinist, and even less known that had he not pursued science, he said he would have been a musician... He confessed to thinking about science in terms of images and intuitions, often drawn directly from his experiences as a musician, only later converting these into logic, words and mathematics.".
Helmholtz:"Palestrina's music clearly caught Helmholtz's imagination. In his volume On the Sensations of Tone, he repeated the latest findings on the composer's alleged Protestant influences; for the Prussian scientist, they explained the clarity of Palestrina's style. His analysis of the Stabat mater was directed at giving this clarity some foundation in the composer's acute awareness of distortions in harmony. The basic idea was that a composer's knowledge of how to combine sounds would come forward in the music itself, even if there were no explicit rules and even if the rules that had been formulated through instruction would not account for the physiological conditions of hearing."
Huygens: "Like his father, Christiaan was a more than competent musician. But whereas Constantijn enjoyed concert performances and the social possibilities that they opened up, Christiaan’s interest in music was more theoretical. In common with many thinkers of the 17th century, he had his own ideas of how music should sound, and he devised a division of the octave into 31 carefully spaced notes that he calculated would both make for a pleasing sound and facilitate matters important to performing musicians, such as transposition between keys. Unlike most, however, he went further and had built for him a special harpsichord that demonstrated this system. Perhaps Christiaan’s feeling for music helped him to the realisation that, like sound, light too travels in a wavelike fashion."
Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist and polymath, is famous for having collaborated with Albert Einstein on his original work, which came to be called Bose-Einstein statistics. However, very few people know that Bose was gifted at playing the Esraj, an Indian stringed instrument similar to the violin. He often used to perform for his students and colleagues at Calcutta and Dhaka universities.
William Herschel comes to mind, if you consider this polymath to be a physicist - he built telescopes, discovered infra-red radiation in sunlight, discovered Uranus, and more.
Recordings of his compositions are available.
Boltzmann was a trained classical pianist who, in his teenage years, was taught by no less than Anton Bruckner. We don't know how long these lessons lasted but it is believed that they ended when Bruckner left a wet raincoat on a piece of furniture, prompting Boltzmann's mother to tell him not to return and to appoint a new teacher for her son.
Boltzmann was known to perform (at least parts of) Liszt's piano transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies. The only first hand account of his playing comes from Ostwald's daughter during a regularly scheduled music evening at Ostwald's home. Her rather comical description is of an older, chubby Boltzmann balancing "three pairs of spectacles" on his nose as he struggle to read the sheets.
I'm not sure how far it really went, but Feynman was famous for his love of bongos and played them on many occasions: Richard Feynman Bongo Drums "Orange Juice" (YouTube).
Max Planck was a singer, pianist, organist, and cellist on the verge of studying music instead of physics. Apparently he had absolute pitch and even composed an operetta [2].
Galileo Galilei not only had a musical background (his father was a professional musician and he became an accomplished lutenist himself) but he allegedly used his musical skills to measure time in his experiments about free fall. Therefore, Galileo's musical background played a crucial role on his discoveries in Physics.
Sir James Jeans. He entertained house guests with informal concerts on two pianos (Jeans and his wife). I would especially recommend his book: 'Science and Music'. Might be for free on the internet archive.
Prof. J M A Danby ('Tony Danby'), physicist & mathematician and author of the well-known "Fundamentals of Celestial Mechanics" (1962 and later editions), with minor planet 3415 Danby named after him, was also in his earlier days a professional musician, in the mid-1950s first-chair oboist in one of the London orchestras among other musical positions.
William Hershel has already been mentioned, but Caroline Lucretia Herschel (sister to William) was also a musician: a harpsichordist and singer. She made some of the first performances of William's musical work. Indeed it was through their musical collaborations that Caroline began to assist William in his astronomical work, eventually becoming an independent researcher and (arguably) the first professional female scientist.
My favorite was Edward Teller. In the summer of 1972 he gave all 48 Bach Preludes and Fugues and got me interested in Baroque music. (I am now 80 and still trying to memorize the BWV1013 flute partita.)
In the engineering class, a student asked, "Dr. Teller, how small can you make a nuclear device?" He replied, "We don't advertise this, but we made some that didn't go off at all."
Johannes Kepler. I figured he'd be an honorable mention since music made a significant impact on his theories.
Kepler was lightly trained in music but he never thought of himself as skilled in composition or performance. He often associated with musicians in court and wrote about music theory and various tuning systems.
Though he was engaged in reviving the ancient vision of cosmic harmony, Kepler’s awareness of contemporary music informed crucial departures from the ancients. To begin with fundamental issues of interval construction, Kepler parted company with the Pythagorean tuning as transmitted by Boethius and Macrobius, who defined the major third as 81:64 and the minor third as 32:27. Instead, Kepler advocated just intonation (5:4 and 6:5, for the major and minor thirds, respectively). In justification, Kepler asserts that the Pythagoreans “were so much given over to this form of philosophizing through numbers that they did not even stand by the judgment of their ears, though it was by their evidence that they had originally gained entry to philosophy; but they marked out what was melodic and what was unmelodic, what was consonant and what was dissonant, from their numbers alone, doing violence to the natural prompting of hearing.” Though Kepler praises Ptolemy for including just intonation among his tunings, Kepler considers that Ptolemy still erred by denying that thirds and sixths were consonances, so that “the man who restored the judgment of the ears to its rightful place in words and doctrine nevertheless deserted it again."
Earthly Music and Cosmic Harmony: Johannes Kepler’s Interest in Practical Music, Especially Orlando di Lasso, Peter Pesic.
Kepler applied his studies in music theory to describe celestial motion in his Harmonices Mundi (The Harmony of the World) and described their motion through sheet music notation. In the final section of the work, he discusses his discovery of the "third law of planetary motion".
