If I could travel back in time, I’d like to have a pint with Isaac Newton. It would surely be quite a sight. We’d chat and make a toast to our (actually just my) unforeseeable future. I’d spill my beer (and he wouldn’t, because he was cool like that) and then he’d remind me that, “For every action is an equal and opposite reaction.” And if the great man was around today, I’m sure he’d have just as much to say about the other weekend.I saved myself and was well rested for a night with Carl Cox. This man deserves all the energy I can muster and I was prepared to let it all go for the legendary DJ. The floor was packed by 2am and when Coxy came on, almost everyone had their hands in their air and some tip-toed forward to have a better look at the man: When the first track dropped the crowd went wild. This exemplifies Newton’s first law, the Law of Inertia, which states that: “An object remains in uniform motion indefinitely until a force acts upon it to alter its motion.” The crowd/object was shuffling its feet until Coxy/the force let loose, which got the crowd screaming and dancing out of their minds: Hello, altered motion.Then the great man picked up the pace. That’s where we come to Newton’s second law, the Law of Acceleration: “Force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration.” Music might not have a mass of its own, but the surging crowd sure did. Coxy accelerated and decelerated his mixes as he deemed fit, the masses danced until their knees gave out and by the end there was no denying that, on a night like that, music really is a force to be reckoned with.Sadly it wasn’t until the next day that I began to ruminate on the links between music and physics. If I’d thought of it at the time, I might have shouted, “Accelerate the force Coxy!” across the dancefloor. But that would only have proven the most famous of his laws, the Law of Reciprocal Action, the one about every action having an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, that would probably have meant a bunch of very excited people stopping dead in their tracks and looking at me as if I’d just been released from a hospital ward. The kind where straightjackets are the height of fashion.So yeah, music and Newton. The unstoppable force meets the immovable genius.
