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.
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.