A New Science
Recently republished, this beautifully illustrated hard back version of Hans Jenny’s original book with 350 photographs and 16–full page colour images, depicts how audible sound structures matter ~ reflecting a variety of patterns throughout nature. In fact, just looking at the pictures provide ample insights.

Cymatics, the study of wave phenomena was pioneered by Swiss medical doctor and natural scientist, Hans Jenny (1904 – 1972), and this revised edition contains the complete English language text of the bi-lingual editions published in 1967 and 1972, illustrating these amazing phenomena in vivid detail.

Dr Jenny’s cymatic images are truly awe inspiring, not only for their visual beauty in portraying the inherent responsiveness of matter to sound (vibration) but because they inspire a deep recognition that we ourselves are part of this intricate, vibrational matrix – the music of the spheres!

Hans Jenny was a Renaissance man – medical doctor, painter, pianist, scientist and researcher, whose grasp of the history of science and philosophy gave him an exceptionally vast perspective. He taught science at the Rudolf Steiner School in Zurich before beginning his practice as a family physician in Dornach, and was a life-long student of Anthroposophy.

As a natural scientist, Dr Jenny explored the diversity of life forms, always with a view toward the wholeness of nature. His insight into unseen forces of nature lay in his ability to perceive the distinctive characteristics of the individual as well as its archetypal form, while never losing sight of the wholeness of the system which gives rise to both. He was a true mystic, a seeker into the infinitude of Nature, questing for the realisation of what it is to be truly human. For Jenny, Cymatics was no mere philosophical conjecture, but a way of life or perhaps, a way into life.

The science of sound appears to have begun in 1787 when Ernst Chaldni, a musician and physicist, published in German: Discoveries Concerning the Theory of Music. He was born in 1756 (the same year as Mozart) and died in 1829 (the same year as Beethoven) and laid the foundations for that discipline within physics that came to be called Acoustics, - the Science of Sound.

By drawing his violin bow across the edge of flat plates covered with sand, Chaldni produced a variety of patterns having the quality of certain perfectly symmetrical, geometrical shapes, demonstrating that sound actually does affect physical matter. Nowadays, these shapes and patterns are known by the term: “Chaldni figures”.

During the nineteenth century several mathematicians studied the patterns created by the intersection of two “sine wave” curves reflecting the introduction of “wave phenomena” (of an electro-magnetic nature) and their corresponding Harmonics - whose patterns were created by the intersections of two such curves, where their axes are perpendicular to each other. Sometimes known as Bowditch (an American) curves or Lissajous curves (a Frenchman), both mathematicians concluded that these design patterns arose from frequencies, or oscillations per second which were in simple, whole number ratios to each other: 1:1, 1:2, 1:3 and so on.

These ratios are themselves reminiscent of The Great Monochord, published by Dr Robert Fludd the Hermetic Philosopher and alchemist. ‘One of the last of the true Renaissance men’ according to Prof. Joscelyn Godwin who, referring to Fludd’s ‘Divine Monochord’ created between 1617 and 1631, thereby disclosed similar proportions of octaves and numerals, one such example of which is: 18 x 64 = 1152 (Mediatas major).

The latter number has great significance according to John Michell, the international cosmologist, who identified this ‘Harmonic 1152’ as Plato’s ‘moving finger of Eternity’. The reference here to a Plato number is most appropriate as many of the Bowditch/ Lissajous curves appear as ‘polygons’ (many sided figures) directly related to the ‘five regular Solids of Plato’, including pentagons (5-sided) and hexagons (6-sided), now identifiable in the helical structure of DNA (see: John’s Crooked Soley compendium).

Given a set of measurements corresponding to two specific acoustic frequencies, measured in Hertz, when manifesting as two distinctly different but totally symmetrical patterns, there is no real problem in determining the precise mathematical relationship between the two shapes. The resultant formulae (sine waves derived from complex numbers) are productive, being permutable and much more informative than those composed of simple ‘algorithms’.

Jenny took his experiments much further as described in detail in his book. He made use of crystal oscillators where one could change the frequency or amplitude of sounds, at will, and his invention of the ‘tonoscope’ enabled human voice resonances to be made visible, without the intermediary of any electronic instruments. One could see the visible images of a song or a vowel. Not only could you hear a melody, a letter, a vowel or word – you could see it! Remarkably, Jenny found in particular that when the vowel of an ancient language – Hebrew or Sanskrit - was pronounced, the sand took the shape of the written symbol of the vowel itself! Reminiscent of Gematria, unlike modern languages!

A number of waves crossing each other at right angles look like a woven pattern, and it is precisely that they meet at 90-degree angles that give rise to the Lissajous figures. Jenny also found that there is an antigravity effect created by harmonic vibrations. There is a continuous transformation “he says” from one set condition to the opposite set. He was convinced that biological evolution is a result of vibrations and speculated that every cell in Nature has its own frequency. “A number of cells with the same frequency create a new frequency which is in harmony with the original, which in its turn possibly forms an organ that also creates a new frequency in harmony with the two original ones.”

Jenny was saying that the key to understanding how we can heal the body “with the help of tones” lies in our understanding of how different frequencies influence genes, cells and various structures in the body. These statements by Jenny appear to be a premonition of the discovery by Crick and Watson of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the primary genetic material in all living organisms and its unique helical bonding mechanism.

Summing up these phenomena in the closing chapter of Cymatics Jenny highlights the fundamental and generative power of the vibration, with its periodicity – sustaining the phenomena within its two poles. At one pole there is form, the figurative pattern, or structure. At the other there is motion, the dynamic process, constituting an indivisible whole. The manifested patterns created by Jenny in his laboratory are ‘snapshots’ of a dynamic process, just as snowflakes are ‘snapshots’ of the structure of ‘raindrops’ crystallised in a snow storm, ~ ‘silent vibrations’ ~ into and out of hidden dimensions.

It is now being said: “that there is great similarity between Cymatic pictures and quantum particles”. In both cases, that which appears to be a solid form is also a wave, created and organised by the principle of pulses – or vibration. The mystery of Sound is that it is empowered by an underlying vibration! In an attempt to explain this unity in the dualism between wave and form, physicists developed the quantum field theory in which the vibration, or resonance (referred to by Francis Bacon as Action at a Distance) is understood to be the one true reality: the particle or form and the wave or motion being the only two polar manifestations of the one reality – in fact, an electro-magnetic wave phenomena. (See: www.world-mysteries.com/sci_cymatics.htm).

In 1996 two mathematicians, Profs. Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time) and his opponent Roger Penrose (originally his peer reviewer), hotly debated quantum mechanics in Cambridge University. Hawking reported verbatim one such debate in a chapter ~ ‘Quantum Cosmology’~ later published in their book: The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton University Press) identifying two different diagrams in particular: the Carter-Penrose model, which is ‘square’ (2-D), and ‘the Euclidean Schwarzchild Solution’ ~ “where the centre of spherical symmetry goes to zero”.

But by changing the ‘square’ to a Cube (3-D) model having a Euclidean Sphere inside ~ and applying new formulae based on a study of the quanta, which can then transform symmetrically ~ there could be provided testable predictions to current quantum theories.

Cymatics is a must for serious researchers into the Science of Parapsychology.

Peter Welsford, FCA. Ó 2006. A former Treasurer of The Scientific & Medical Network, a researcher and writer in physics, mathematics and philosophy. Currently researching the H-H Factor, Hidden Harmonics and their implicit connections with subatomic particles, superstrings and spacetime, e-mail: pawelsford@hotmail.com.