Einstein’s violin and the cognitive roots of the Scientific Revolution

Today music is just entertainment. Perhaps it is also a cultural fact, but in an aesthetic realm, foreign to science. Indeed this is the view that has prevailed in the last three centuries. Until the 17th century however, music was regarded either as a practice or as a mathematical theory, that every good mathematician and every good musicologist knew. In ancient Greece music played an even greater role, in the platonic polis it was part of both basic education (with gymnastics and grammar) and higher education (with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy).