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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

photos from Galileo's Muse lecture

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 27, 2010 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Benjamin Wolff

"Galileo's Muse: A Performance of Music, Physics, and Creativity"

ABSTRACT -- The year is 1604. A young Italian scientist sits alone in his workshop, surrounded by the apparatus of his experiments—pendulums, bronze balls, wooden boards, and planes of various lengths.

For months on end he has been trying to figure out how objects move. But now, in frustration, he realizes that his eye is just not quick enough, and his clocks not precise enough for the measurements that he desperately needs.

Troubled by his failure he walks to the corner of his workshop and picks up his beloved lute. He tunes its strings and begins to play. Then, as music fills the space around him, he has an idea…

Galileo's Muse explores the surprising relationship between the scientist Galileo Galilei and the music of late Renaissance Italy. It tells the delightful and unexpected story of how Galileo's love of music and his experience as a lute player held the key to one of his most important scientific accomplishments—the formulation of his "Law of Falling Bodies."

With rarely performed lute music by Galileo's father and brother, lively 17th century Italian dances and trio sonatas, and a reenactment of Galileo's breakthrough experiment of the inclined plane, Galileo's Muse will draw you into the process of creativity, revealing in words, sights, and sounds how insight often emerges from where we least expect it.

SPEAKER -- Benjamin Wolff is Assistant Professor of Music at Hofstra University in New York and a member of the Hofstra String Quartet. He is also a member of Sinfonia New York and performs regularly with Concert Royal and other professional ensembles in the New York metropolitan area. He studied cello and chamber music at Juilliard and graduated with a B.A. degree in history from Columbia University. He received his M.M. in cello performance from Rice University's Shepherd School. From 1993 to 1995 he was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and was awarded its C.D. Jackson prize for excellence in 1994. In 1997 he co-founded the Foothills Chamber Music Festival in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. For eight years he led the Festival as cellist and co-Artistic Director as it presented a celebrated series of summer performances, lectures and symposia at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, and the Delta Fine Arts Center. His experience with interdisciplinary learning and thinking has led him to speak about creativity from the perspective of the world of the arts at the Center for Collaborative Organizations, the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME), and the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange (LPPDE). Galileo's Muse has been presented recently at CUNY's "Science and The Arts" series, Hofstra's IDEAS Institute, Salisbury University, AME 2009, and Rice University.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov