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balance between order and disorder, or entropy, he said. "We can look at a balance—or a competition—between dissonance and entropy of sound—and see that phase transitions can also occur from disordered sound to the ordered structures of music," he said. Berezovsky ... he's uncovering the "emergent structures of musical harmony" inherent in the art, just as order comes from disorder in the physical world. He believes that could mean a whole new way of looking at music of the past, present and future. Berezovsky said his theory is more than just an illustration of how we think about music. Instead,...

Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer 09 March 2006 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Zeeya Merali DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology. The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara,...