Francisco Miraval
We should all celebrate the incredible accomplishment by the European Space Agency of landing a probe on a comet. The meeting between the Rosetta space probe and comet 67P is a historical event for our knowledge of the universe and of humanity. There are, of course, many questions still to be answered. And one of those questions is why comet 67P sings.
To say that 67P emits a sound due to its magnetic field, even if that’s the case, appears to be a superficial explanation. In fact, people have compared, with beautiful results, the sound from comet 67P with Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of The Bumblebee. Who can’t deny that what we hear from 67P is music?
It is not just sound, it is music, as several musicians have pointed out. Our post-modern, techno-scientific mind perhaps will be unable or unwilling to accept that a comet can sing. But, why the comet sings? And if we accept that 67P is singing, should we then assume all other celestial bodies are also singing?
In ancient times, thinkers and singers, such as Pythagoras (around 600 BCE), would say: “Of course!” For them, the whole universe was singing. It was called “music of the spheres” and, according to legend, Pythagoras was able to hear that music. The idea of a cosmic symphony persisted for a long time and even in the beginning of the 17th century, Kepler, one of the “fathers” of modern astronomy, wrote about the “harmony of the worlds.”
Therefore, perhaps it can be say that we have lost our ability to hear the songs of the universe. It is not that the universe is not singing. It’s that we are not listening. Perhaps, as we the sound of the rain or the tic-tac of the clock, we simply stop paying attention to that sound. Or perhaps we are now unable to perceive that sound.
But just because we can’t hear the music of the spheres we can’t assume that music doesn’t or didn’t exist. Perhaps Julian Jaynes is right when, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1975), he says the human brain changed 1000 years before Common Era and, for that reason, we can’t hear sounds our ancestors did hear.
Perhaps for a long time we were deaf to celestial music and now we are recovering (thanks to technology) the ability to listen those songs. If that’s the case, the biggest accomplishment of the Rosetta mission was not connecting us with a comet but reconnecting us with ourselves.
Even if we accept that’s the case, why is a comet singing? Perhaps that’s a ridiculous question, like asking why the sun emits light or why the wind moves. From that point of view, the comet sings because (apparently) that’s what comets do. And the song will be sang even if nobody listens.
Paraphrasing Anthony De Mello in The Song of the Bird, the comet sings “Not because (it) has a statement, but because (it) has a song.”