7:00pm musical performance, 7:30pm lecture

More than fifty years ago, John Coltrane drew the twelve musical notes in a circle and connected them by straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music.

Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Inspired by his book, The Jazz of Physics, Alexander follows the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics - a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim — revealing that the ancient poetic idea of the "Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics.

For those unable to make it to Evanston, the lecture will be livestreamed on CIERA's website: https://ciera.northwestern.edu/ciera-livestream/

Distinguished Speaker 

Stephon Alexander is an award-winning theoretical physicist of international repute, author, and jazz musician whose work is at the interface between cosmology, particle physics, quantum gravity, AI and music technology. His expertise lays in constructing new theories of the early universe and elementary particle physics that has predictions for the universe at present, such as dark energy and dark matter. He also combines mathematics and tools from theoretical physics into machine learning, the geometry and cognition of musical perception, signal processing and computational algorithms.

Alexander is a Professor of Physics at Brown University, and a past President of the National Society of Black Physicists and is currently the CEO and Founder of the non-profit SoundPlusScience Inc. Alexander was also the Executive Director of the Harlem Gallery of Science. He had previous appointments at Stanford University, Imperial College, Penn State, Dartmouth College and Haverford College. Alexander is a specialist in the field of string theory and cosmology, where the physics of superstrings are applied to address longstanding questions in cosmology. In 2001, he co-invented the model of cosmic inflation based on string theory.

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