I think other readers - and writers - may be interested in this reply I wrote to the first person who read & replied to my post on "Pythagorean Harmonics."

To Manannan Niall
Sunday, April 24, 2005

I thought you might be interested in how I came to compose the piece on Pythagorean harmonics. I actually spent a couple of weeks on it, puzzling over what I saw in the woodcut and trying to figure out what was going on, mathematically. The questions I posed to it, and that it posed to me, involved a truly Galilean series of "thought experiments," Those questions, and my solutions to them, are recorded in the finished essay.

To get a feeling for the ratios involved in stopping string lengths I relied some on my experience as a violinist. I then tested my ideas in dialogue with a friend who is a harpist, and she demonstrated some of them to me on her harp. The woodcut I found in a book I own by Gerald Tauber on the history of cosmology. My remarks on how it was made came from "hands on" experience in making prints. My final remarks on Newton's Pythagoreanism were inspired by an essay on that topic in another of my books, an anthology of scholarly articles on Isaac Newton.