[Aiwendil]

None the less, it's bloody fun attempting to apply and make more realistic the world of Tolkien. So while this may no longer help the Aunilindale entry, it has become a viable Tolkien topic.

Agreed.

"The music of the Ainur is in no meaningful way analogous to vibrations in the medium of the early universe."

hmm why not?

Well it would seem to me that the burden of proof would lie with those (completely hypothetical people) that would argue that there is a meaningful connection.

I simply don't see how the two things are related in anything other than a purely accidental fashion. They both involve vibrations or sound, yes. They both occurred relatively early in the history of their respective universes. But I see no resemblance beyond this. Certainly Tolkien did not have vibrations in the roughly uniform, ultra-dense, early universe in mind when he wrote the Ainulindale. Nor is there anything analogous to the Ainur in those early vibrations.

But most importantly, the fundamental import or meaning of the two events are completely different. The music of the Ainur was a literal song, a work of art, created by intelligent beings. It corresponds in some metaphysical (and mystical) way with the unfolding of events in the history of Ea. It existed before Ea, the "World that Is", and in fact was the plan or design for Ea. Vibrations in the early universe, on the other hand, were essentially random phenomena not created as art (and certainly not the epitome of art); they do not correspond with actual events now in anything more than a chaos-theory way, and they certainly do not correspond to our peculiar situation as rational beings; they existed inside the universe rather than before it.

can you elaborate a tiny bit without it being too involved?

Well essentially what I mean is that Tolkien, in the construction of his legendarium, did not take quantum mechanics or entropy into account (because he did not need to). He was creating a fictitious and, more importantly, mythical world. So there is no reason to expect anything in his legendarium to correspond with scientific truths in physics, except to the extent that those physical truths shape our most basic understanding of the world. So from the real, scientific world he carries over facts such as "humans are bipedal", "iron is harder than wood", etc - but not "uncertainty in position times uncertainty in momentum must be greater than or equal to planck's constant over four pi" or "the total amount of disorder must statistically increase with time for all time". Iluvatar and the Ainur are certainly not bound by real physical laws. Nor are Elves and Men (Osanwe, for example, would appear to violate special relativity - though perhaps quantum non-locality could come to its rescue!).

But I don't in any way mean to condemn the game of finding surprising similarities between Tolkien's world and the real world. I only mean that such similarities end just where they begin; they are accidental, not meaningful.