Cycles in Composers

My friend William Eric Green is a concert pianist and composer. He recently suggested on Facebook that there seemed to be a 125 year cycle in birth dates of composers (I should mention that he is also an expert at remembering birthdays):

A slightly geeky one for the composers …I’ve always been intrigued that Bach, Handel and Scarlatti were all born in 1685 (Rameau in ’83, Telemann a year or two earlier) then 125 years later Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Verdi and Wagner were all born within 4 years of each other. Could there be some sort 125-year ‘famous composer’ cycle …? Going back to 1560, Gabrieli, Morley, Peri, Dowland, Bull and Sweelinck were all born between 1557 and 1562. One website of the Top 20 composers 1400-1600 (average 1 per 20 years) gives 3 of those above. Gosh. Going ahead 125 years from 1810 to 1935, composers born 1933-37 include – Penderecki, Gorecki, Maxwell Davies, Birtwistle, Schnittke, Kancheli, Part, Riley, Reich and Glass. Gosh again. So … then I drew a timeline then stabbed my pencil on random dates, looking for important composers 2 years either side, and got – 1720 (only Leopold Mozart); 1741 (Boccherini, Dittersdorf); 1826 (Bruckner, Smetana, Strauss, Foster) 1867 (Glazunov, Nielsen, Sibelius, Satie, Joplin) and 1923 (Piazzolla, Xennakis, Ligeti, Berio, Boulez). Admittedly, 1921-25 had some influential ones – as much as 1933-37? I noted that even the 3 years 1872-5 produced Scriabin, Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninov, Ives, Schoenberg and Ravel, which didn’t fit the pattern … then realised 1872/3 is exactly halfway between 1810 and 1935 (although other halfway points didn’t yield much).Being an astrological nosy parker, I dabbled in some of the horoscopes but couldn’t see anything significant. Am I showing undue bias anywhere? And any comment from universal cycles expert Ray Tomes?

This generated lots of discussion with other people also. Eventually I got a list of classical composers on Wikipedia.

William added a remark:

These were groups of significant composers who changed music in some way, rather than just composers per se

But I am unqualified to state who changed music, so I just went for dates when there were lots of composers born and few immediately afterwards. I added the purple lines to the Wikipedia chart to get this result.

The 5 purple lines are all close to125 years apart each, and agree very well with William’s dates. It seems that there really is a 125 year cycle in composers. I think that Raymond Wheeler had music listed in his big book and wonder if he had a cycle period mentioned?

Chladni Figures in Fifteenth Century Rosslyn Chapel

Thomas and Stuart Mitchell have discovered a coded music system based on Chladni Figures or Cymatics diagrams present in decorations of the Rosslyn Chapel which was built South of Edinburgh in the 15th Century (and that appeared in the Da Vinci Code)!

In the twentieth century, the study of cymatics was shown in videos and books by Hans Jenny. This built on the much earlier work of Ernst Chladni (this link has many examples of the figures as well as videos of musical instruments sounds) relating to vibrating plates called Chladni Figures (Scientific American article). I discovered when researching this article that Chladni was aware of Robert Hooke doing a similar thing in 1680. And now it seems that this was not the beginning either, as Chladni figures are present in the Rosslyn Chapel built in the fifteenth century.

Examples of Chladni Figures

Father and son Musicians unlock mystery melody in chapel. Of course being musicians they had to compose an appropriate piece using the symbols as guides.

Each of the cubes here has a Chladni figure carved into it. Often there are Angels playing trumpets at the ends of the rows of “notes”.

Science Cycles Summit January 16th 2021

Please visit this link to get details of the upcoming science cycles summit. This is the first summit in many years for scientific cycles. It marks the recent joining together of The Foundation for the Study of Cycles and Cycles Research Institute.

The recorded talks will be available afterwards on Youtube.

Cycles Research Institute merges with Foundation for the Study of Cycles

The Foundation for the Study of Cycles existed from 1941 to 1998 when it stopped operations due to financial and other problems. As a result A few old members decided to set up Cycles Research Institute in 2004 as an internet only operation to contain costs. Some years later FSC reappeared and operated for some years. There were problems because of the managements style and although CRI tried to work with FSC, it was not to be. FSC folded up again. Then two years ago a letter appeared on FSC site:

The Future of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles – A Letter from our new Chairman Dr. Richard Smith

The Foundation was back in force, with a new board, a proper constitution, its charitable status restored and doing the proper things for the study of cycles. Discussions happened between the two organizations and very soon it was agreed to merge.

Ray Tomes from CRI was appointed science director for FSC and has appointed scientists and researchers from various fields to be advisers to FSC. We have great confidence in the future of FSC because it is following the vision of Edward R Dewey when it was originally set up.

Already FSC has held a financial cycles summit over a week and the videos from this can be viewed on youtube along with other material. A scientific seminar is planned for 16th January 2021 which is free to view and will also be posted to Youtube. Many other activities are happening such as a Cycles TV channel with frequent market analysis and talks to be released on a regular basis.

“The Faces of Time” with Simon Shnoll

Even before Simon Shnoll gave this video interview in 2003, I was fortunate to visit him in Pushchino at the Biophysics laboratory of Russian Academy of Science in 1996. I was very interested in their work and they were also interested in mine.

They had found that radioactive Plutonium decay was not random as is generally believed. By recording counts of the number of decays each minute (for 18 years at the time that I visited) they studied it for patterns. By collecting an hour of measurements they could make a histogram with 60 values. Histograms in adjacent hours were more similar than ones some hours later. And then after 24 hours they became more similar again. They found that after a day, a month and a year the histograms became more similar. So clearly the Earth, Sun and Moon played some part in this.

I proposed that there should also be 3 and 6 minute cycles in the decay but they had not found them. Using their data, I showed that these two cycles existed and that the periods were not absolutely stable but fluctuated about by about 5%. Natalia Udaltsova went through the entire history of the records and found the 3 and 6 minute cycles clearly present throughout.

I gave a seminar in Pushchino on Harmonics theory as seen on the right below. Also, walking beside the river with Simon Shnoll and Natalia Udaltsova.

 

Many years later western physicist have confirmed an annual cycle in radioactive decay. They attribute it to the distance of the earth from the Sun. That is a reasonable assumption.

What led me to make this post was the discovery of a set of videos from Simon Shnoll’s 2003 appearance on The Gordon show. It is in Russian with English captions.

Here is a link to further discussions between Shnoll and interested parties. http://noosphere.princeton.edu/shnoll2.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

405,000 year cycle in Earth Eccentricity found in 215 million years of climate

One of the four main Milankovitch cycles is a 405,000 year fluctuation in the Earth’s orbital eccentricity. This means that the Earth’s orbit gets more and less circular over that period, affecting the extremes of climate. The variation is due to the effects of Jupiter and Venus which are the two planets with the greatest tidal effect.

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/24/6153

“Rhythmic climate cycles of various assumed frequencies recorded in sedimentary archives are increasingly used to construct a continuous geologic timescale. However, the age range of valid theoretical orbital solutions is limited to only the past 50 million years. New U–Pb zircon dates from the Chinle Formation tied using magnetostratigraphy to the Newark–Hartford astrochronostratigraphic polarity timescale provide empirical confirmation that the unimodal 405-kiloyear orbital eccentricity cycle reliably paces Earth’s climate back to at least 215 million years ago, well back in the Late Triassic Period.”

“The Newark–Hartford astrochronostratigraphic polarity timescale (APTS) was developed using a theoretically constant 405-kiloyear eccentricity cycle linked to gravitational interactions with Jupiter–Venus as a tuning target and provides a major timing calibration for about 30 million years of Late Triassic and earliest Jurassic time. While the 405-ky cycle is both unimodal and the most metronomic of the major orbital cycles thought to pace Earth’s climate in numerical solutions, there has been little empirical confirmation of that behavior, especially back before the limits of orbital solutions at about 50 million years before present. Moreover, the APTS is anchored only at its younger end by U–Pb zircon dates at 201.6 million years before present and could even be missing a number of 405-ky cycles. To test the validity of the dangling APTS and orbital periodicities, we recovered a diagnostic magnetic polarity sequence in the volcaniclastic-bearing Chinle Formation in a scientific drill core from Petrified Forest National Park (Arizona) that provides an unambiguous correlation to the APTS. New high precision U–Pb detrital zircon dates from the core are indistinguishable from ages predicted by the APTS back to 215 million years before present. The agreement shows that the APTS is continuous and supports a stable 405-kiloyear cycle well beyond theoretical solutions. The validated Newark–Hartford APTS can be used as a robust framework to help differentiate provinciality from global temporal patterns in the ecological rise of early dinosaurs in the Late Triassic, amongst other problems.

• magnetostratigraphy
• geochronology
• astrochronology
• Milankovitch
• Triassic

The 27-My Newark–Hartford astrochronostratigraphic polarity timescale (APTS) (1) is one of the longest continuous APTS segments presently available and calibrates much of the Late Triassic and earliest Jurassic geologic timescale. It relies on the geomagnetic polarity and cycle stratigraphies of over 6,900 m of coring in the Newark basin (2⇓–4) and an overlapping 2,500-m-thick outcrop section in the nearby Hartford basin (5), both in eastern North America. The composite continental record is paced by 66 McLaughlin lithologic cycles spanning 27 My of the Norian and Rhaetian of the Late Triassic and Hettangian and Sinemurian of the Early Jurassic, reflecting the response of climate to the long astronomical eccentricity variation with a presumed 405-ky period. The 405-ky period cycle is related to the gravitational interaction of Jupiter and Venus (g2–g5 cycle) and is the prominent and most stable term in the approximation of eccentricity of Earth’s orbital variations on geologic timescales despite chaotic behavior of the Solar System (6). The record also encompasses 51 Poisson-distributed geomagnetic polarity intervals (with an additional 15 polarity intervals in the fluvial noncyclic sediments toward the base of the section, which by extrapolation of sediment accumulation rates extend the record an additional ∼6 My into the Carnian), providing a template for global correlation. However, the astronomically paced polarity sequence is anchored at essentially only one level. High-precision U–Pb zircon dates in lavas and intrusions of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP), which are clustered in close spatiotemporal proximity to the Triassic–Jurassic boundary (7), were collapsed to a calibration age of 201.6 Ma for the onset of Chron E23r close to the base of a McLaughlin cycle (Ecc₄₀₅: k = 498.25, where k is the inferred number of 405-ky eccentricity cycles projected back from the most recent maximum at 0.216 million years ago as k = 1), which immediately underlies the oldest CAMP basalts. In the absence of other directly dated horizons, the APTS relies on the assumption of a continuous section with no substantial hiatus(es) in deposition of these continental sediments, which would potentially result in one or more unrecorded 405-ky cycles. The specific timing of the APTS is also dependent on the untested reliability at this distant age range of the 405-ky cycle.

The developing APTS has been successfully used for global correlations in marine and nonmarine facies (e.g., refs. 8 and 9; see ref. 1). Nevertheless, there have been persistent suggestions made largely on the basis of nonmarine biostratigraphic correlations that several million years of Rhaetian (latest Triassic) time are missing in a cryptic unconformity that supposedly occurs just above Chron E23r in the Newark Supergroup basins (e.g., refs. 10 and 11). If true, this would have consequences of comparable magnitude in the timing of events based on anchoring the astrochronology below the alleged cryptic unconformity to the U–Pb-dated CAMP lavas above it. Therefore, a test is needed of the conjoined assumptions of stratigraphic continuity and the 405-ky periodicity for the long eccentricity cycle that are implicit in the construction of the Newark–Hartford APTS.

The Late Triassic-age Chinle Formation (Fm.) of the American Southwest (Fig. 1A) consists of fluvial and minor lacustrine facies interfingered with paleosols and, importantly for the task at hand, has numerous sandstone horizons with volcaniclastic detritus containing detrital zircons amenable for U–Pb dating (12). The Black Forest Bed (BFB) within the Petrified Forest Member (Mb.) of the Chinle Fm. at Chinde Point in the northern sector of Petrified Forest National Park (PFNP) was the first unit to be successfully U–Pb zircon dated in the PFNP section (13). Recent high-precision U–Pb zircon dating of the BFB (12) made it an attractive target for calibration of the APTS. Sampling of outcrop sections demonstrated the feasibility of obtaining a magnetostratigraphy (14) even though revised long-distance lithostratigraphic correlations of the Sonsela Mb. of the Chinle Fm. (15) indicate that there may be a large gap in the composite magnetostratigraphic section. A main scientific objective of the inaugural drilling effort of the Colorado Plateau Coring Project (16) at PFNP (core CPCP-PFNP-13-1A; henceforth PFNP-1A) (Fig. 1B) was to obtain a magnetostratigraphic sequence directly supported by high-precision U–Pb detrital zircon dates for the Chinle Fm. with unequivocal superposition and a diagnostic polarity signature for correlation to the APTS. Here, we report on paleomagnetic and geochronologic results from the upper ∼280 m of the 519-m-long core recovering a section of the Chinle Fm. down from the lower Owl Rock Mb. to the Mesa Redondo Mb., the Moenkopi Fm. and the uppermost Coconino Sandstone”

 

COVID19 Effect on CO2 levels

Previously I have published articles showing that CO2 change does not cause temperature change but the other way around. Temperature change actually leads CO2 change by 6 months. Which Causes which out of Atmospheric Temperature and CO2 content?

The covid19 pandemic is a terrible thing for the world, but does give a unique opportunity to study industrial production effect on CO2 levels. It has been reported that pollution has dropped by huge amounts over China and then Europe as lockdowns brought industrial production almost to a halt. In America the FED has predicted a 50% drop in GDP in the second  quarter of 2020. See below for links.

It seems safe to assume that this will mean a drastic reduction in human produced CO2. If the theory that humans cause CO2 change and temperature change is correct, then we would expect a big drop in CO2 levels to happen immediately. If my (and others) theory that temperature change causes CO2 change then CO2 levels would not be expected to respond in the same way.

Here is the historical level of CO2 in ppm as measured in Hawaii from 30 March 1958 until 26 March 2020. Clearly CO2 has grown dramatically and at an accelerating rate. There is an obvious yearly cycle also, but it is not totally consistent in the time of year (you can’t see this without analysis).

The growth in CO2 is not consistent in each year, for example there is a faster rise just before 1991 compared to just after. In my previous study there was a multiyear fluctuation which might relate to the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) weather cycle.

To get a measure reasonably free from the annual cycle and rapid growth in CO2, we can compare the present level of CO2 to 365 days earlier. This is shown here.

The scale is considerably expanded here, but it can be seen that there is a fluctuation of period a few years, which is possibly due to ENSO. Let us now look at the last few years of this graph in detail.

The cycle of a few years can be seen to have peaks in early 2016 and early 2019. From 2020 February to 2020 March there is an increase in CO2 compared to a year earlier which is higher then the other recent values. The change in CO2 over the 365 days is around 4.5 ppm. This compares with a typical increase of about 3.5 ppm in recent years and only about 1 ppm back around 1960 when the data began to be collected.

So the big drop in CO2 expected from human emissions is actually a slight increase. I don’t know how to quantify the industrial reduction over the last two months, but I expect it to be in the tens of percent. That should show up as a reduction in CO2 by about 2 or 3 ppm compared to what is actually showing.

No doubt some measures of industrial production and CO2 emissions will become available in the coming months or year. Also, global temperatures will be reported and we can see if that has changed its trend. If it has not reduced temperatures, then the whole climate crisis story will be seen as having no basis in fact.

Some links relating to pollution reduction from covid-19:

New Evidence Shows How COVID-19 Has Affected Global Air Pollution

Has Covid-19 helped ease air pollution?

Coronavirus quarantines have reduced air pollution in China. An expert says that won’t last long

expert reaction to drop in air pollution because of COVID-19

 

Rhythm is Slow Chords

In the early 1990s I had mentioned that the key that music is played in and the tempo might well be related because tempo can be thought of as a very slow note. To understand this, Let us for simplicity assume that a piece of music is in the key of C and that the frequency of middle C is 256 Hz (cycles per second). Then as we go down by an octave at a time, successive Cs will have frequencies in Hz of 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, etc. Now 2 cycles per second is the same as 120 cycles per minute. It might be the case that a piece of music is intended to be produced at a tempo of 120 beats per minute. In that case we may say that the tempo is in the same key as the music.

With harmonics theory I expect that after every two or three ratios of 2 (that is, moving down an octave) there might be a ratio of 3. So in that case the tempo would be 80 or 160 bpm (beats per minute).

My own investigations of some great composers such as Mozart and Beethoven found that they very often did match up key and tempo. But not all composers do. One problem is that the tempo is often not specified accurately enough for our purpose. However I found that Billy Joel specified the tempo accurately and of course we have his recordings to check. He also matched tempo to key. By match I mean that the tempo is either a number of ratios of 2 slower than the key note frequency, or possibly with one ratio of 3 also. On reflection it is possible that a second ratio of 3 should also be allowed.

Not long after I first mentioned this on internet, someone (I forget who. If it was you, please remind me) wrote to me saying something like “someone else has been thinking your thoughts”. They supplied a link to a web site by Stephen Jay and indeed he had been thinking very similar thoughts. He had gone a little further in identifying chords in the commonly used rhythms. Unfortunately after a while his web site disappeared.

A couple of days ago I was thinking about this and remembered the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine which lets you see the internet as it was years ago. Putting in the old link I found the web page existed until the late 1990s. But then I did a search and found that Stephen Jay was mentioned in Wikipedia and had a Web Site which included the Original Article.

Stephen Jay. Read his article on The Theory of Harmonic Rhythm.

Mass Killings in USA

Once again there have been media reports of mass killings by gun shots in USA. Actually, they are more or less a daily occurrence now, it is just the reports that are sporadic. Here is a report that shows the number of mass shooting events each day for 2015 so far:

Shooting in Oregon: So far in 2015, we’ve had 274 days and 294 mass shootings

Actually there is a web site with a further two years data but it needs to be collated into the same form of daily totals before analysis can be done.

Are there cycles in mass shootings? What could cause variations in their occurrence? These questions were examined. This is a spectrum of cycles present in the above 9 months of data. Cycles periods in red are significant except the 365 day one.

We may take the two most prominent cycles of 6.99 and 3.494 days as being a week and half a week. This is not surprising as people’s habits vary greatly by the day of the week. Further analysis shows that there is little difference between the five week days, but compared to them Saturday has 100% more mass shootings and Sunday has 140% more. It reminds me of the old saying “the devil finds work for idle hands”.

As there is only 9 months data, we cannot say that there is a 365 day cycle but it seems quite likely, as seasonal weather patterns play out. There are more killings in the summer months. The other three cycles of 17.35, 5.96 and 2.64 days do not seems to be related to any commonly know cycles.

Combining the above cycles to see how they fit the original data also allows a possible projection. Ideally a longer base period would be used for this, but we can look and see whether or not the future follows the past patterns.

Sadly, we can expect many more mass killings in the future.

The original data and explanations are available here as well as further data going back several years.

How the Sun affects our Minds

One of my absolute favourite Cycles Researchers was Alexander Chizhevsky. We have an article about him on CRI, but this one has much more details of his life.

How the Sun Affects our Minds.

It begins…

More than three-quarters of all instances of human unrest—battles, upheavals, riots, revolutions, and wars—occur during the periods of the maximum number of sunspots in the Sun… So powerful is this cosmic zeitgeber that it may even influence our physical size, our longevity, our mental stability, our propensity to violence, and possibly even what we consider our uniquely individual motivation…

One of the most important conclusions is Chizhevsky’s discovery went beyond periodicities and cycles, for he had uncovered a sobering truth about the human condition: we are not completely in charge of our own destiny.

I would go further and say that we are not at all in charge.

Please read the article. My own conclusion about how the Sun affects our minds is as follows:

The solar wind comes past the earth at about 300 to 700 kilometers per second and fluctuates dramatically. This causes the earth’s electromagnetic field to ring like wind chimes in the wind. The natural frequency of the earth’s electromagnetic field is 8 cycles per second, called the Schumann resonance as that is the rate for electromagnetic waves to travel around the earth. That frequency is right in the middle of human brain wave frequencies so we can understand how the sun affects us.