[dudeinjapan]

An "ad-hominem" attack would be an attack on Mr. Howard "as a person" in order to invalidate his argument. For example: "Terrence Howard is a bad movie actor therefore his scientific ideas are wrong." (I think he's a good actor actually!)

He certainly is an interesting character. As a rough barometer, anyone who goes on Joe Rogan to present their hidden scientific truth of the universe while making an unsubstantiated claim to have "95 patents" is probably worthy of a few giggles. For a full debunking, read on...

Taking his claim "1 times 1 equals more than 1" for example, Mr. Howard may very well be perceiving non-Euclidean space that the rest of us are missing entirely. Certainly if we change the axioms of mathematics then we can jury-rig this claim to be true, but at that point the claim becomes non-falsifiable, and not particularly useful.

Similarly, the claim that "every element in the periodic table has a musical key, and that H, C, Si, Co, Rh are all in the key of E at different octaves", the "octave" seems to be an analog of the periodic table "row" (how many electron shells the atom has), and the "key" seems to be roughly-speaking the relative "column" (relative electronegativity of the valence shell) with E apparently being a "half-full" valence shell. So if we take the "weak claim" that "musical tones are a nice labelling scheme for the elements", it doesn't contribute any new secret knowledge that isn't already well-understood by mainstream chemistry and represented in the standard Periodic Table. On the other hand, if we go with the "strong claim" that elements actually have musical tones, certainly there is no evidence of this in terms of atomic vibrations, photon emission/absorption spectra, etc. More likely Mr. Howard has some form of synesthesia--but again, just because one insists that "the number 4 is green", or that "the month of August tastes like tomatoes" does not make it so.

[6r17]

TBH I think he just confused the freq emited by the Hydrogen Line with the idea that every element has it's own frequency. Which you could actually calculate but is not something analog to the material but also to the conditions it is in.

Now when he speaks of tones in terms of frequencies he isn't crazy at all. You could find out the tone of say the Hydrogen Line by diving it until you are capable of finding out which tone it could match (if you could) - it's funny cause I was kind of thinking of this discovering electromagnetic astronomy when this video came out

Now I had some fun laughing of the b* he could throw, but I'm not entirely sure everybody is as smart at they think they are when they make fun of him.

[dudeinjapan]

> I think he just confused the freq emited by the Hydrogen Line

Howard's idea is taken directly from artist and New Age thinker Walter Russell, specifically his 1926 book "The Universal One":

https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Walter-Russell/dp/1684227348

https://walterrussellblog.wordpress.com/category/tone/

http://www.alexpetty.com/2014/09/21/the-periodic-table-of-li...

Russell may have indeed derived the concept of "tone" from absorption spectral lines which were known since the 1800's, however, there are many obvious logical gaps/flaws, e.g.:

- There are multiple absorption lines per element--sometimes more than 100--not a single line one could call the "tone".

- The lines don't follow any periodicity/doubling/harmonic rule, nor do they regularly ascend/descend in frequency as atomic number increases.

- The lines are light-range THz (nm) rather than acoustic-range Hz. (Howard said explicitly "Hydrogen is 41.5 Hz" but Russell seems to use relative Do-Re-Mi scale rather than a numeric Hz value.)

Howard's/Russell's "tone" seems to be a more New Age-y "intrinsic vibration of matter" which is not actually measurable with any existing instrument. It may have been inspired by the concept of "wave-particle duality" considering that Russell's book was published the same year Schrödinger was working out his wave equations. But more likely, it is a continuation of a much older human tendency to use music and "perfect harmonics" to describe the observed physical world, dating back to Pythagoras' cosmology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis.

If you actually read Russell's work, there are some major "shoe-horning" problems--he invents lots of imaginary elements around Hydrogen and Helium in order to create 8-tone octaves for each, such as "Alphanon", "Hydron", "Luminon", and "Carbogen". For rows 2 and 3, he then runs into the problem that the row has 8 elements (valence shell has 8-electrons), but there are only 7 unique solfeggio notes per octave (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti)--his solution is to not assign solfeggio notes to the noble gases at all, so for example Sodium is "do" and Chlorine is "ti", while Neon and Argon are... nothing. In rows 4+ he subdivides his "mi"s and "so"s. It is pretty clear that had Mendeleev not first invented the Periodic Table, Russell wouldn't have had his musical epiphany.

[6r17]

Oh thank you I did not read Russell's book ! An answer I did not deserve ; Didn't even know about Musica Universalis ; cheers !