La lira desafinada de Pitágoras

Why, among all the arts, has music been the one that has most influenced scientists as important as Pythagoras, Newton, Kepler or Galileo? Through these pages we will not only learn about some of the most fascinating obsessions that besieged these geniuses, but we will also see how a mathematical principle can be hidden even in the simplest song. In La lira detuneda de Pitágoras, Almudena Martín Castro, one of the most original and far-reaching popularizers in our country, proposes a journey towards the search for beauty by scientists of all times, and establishes common echoes with a discipline that we can all enjoy without any prior preparation: music. Planets that sing like sopranos, Mesopotamian melodies that come back to life, mummies that recover their voice, forbidden harmonies mistakenly associated with the devil or rhythms that unite the Earth with the Moon. A surprising and humorous story that reveals the mysteries of the universe. For thirty years, Pythagoras dedicated himself to disseminating the theory of reincarnation and reflecting on the world, accompanied by some of his followers. He also took to playing the lyre and, as Pythagoras was a lot of thinker, in the process he began to wonder why some strings, when combined, produced beautiful sounds -pleasant, consonant-, and others did not. This is how he discovered a fact that we now know to be true: that there are surprisingly simple numbers at the base of musical harmony. And these numbers are the same, from ancient Babylon to reggaeton. Its proportions guided the history of our music to the present day and infected physics with its expectation of beauty.