Harmonizing with Resonance

Energy in autumn leaves, Nov 8, 2025

Sound and light are forms of energy, vibrations, frequencies, bridging for those ready to hear and see the expanse and interiority of space and time, infinity and eternity. One of my very favorite themes, resonance, is wonderfully amplified by Frank Wilczek, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics. From his chapter “Quantum Beauty 1: Music of the Spheres” in A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design:

Each natural vibration pattern takes place at its own natural frequency.  The natural frequency is also called a resonant frequency, for the following reason. If the frequency of your driving force is close to the natural frequency of some pattern, that pattern will leap out in powerful response. For then, and only then, does the external driving force match up with the internal forces, cycle after cycle, to build up the strength of the motion. (pp. 173-4)

Color in woodlands, Nov 8, 2025

 

Wilczek calls James Clerk Maxwell “the first truly modern physicist” (p. 7) and quotes from Maxwell’s private journal:

Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.

Thus ought man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. (from p. 164 in Wilczek’s A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design) 

Morning light, Nov 8, 2025