[Aiwendil]

Lyta_Underhill wrote:

But were not the scientific disciplines originally designated “arts?”

Of course, whether science is an art depends on how you define "art". But regardless of how scientific disciplines may once have been perceived, science is fundamentally and profoundly different from such things as music, painting, and literature. Science is the business of predicting and describing data. Art is the business of producing certain desired responses from the human mind (I would say it is the business of producing aesthetic pleasure).

Indeed, some fine art is based upon mathematical rendering into visual or sound media.

If what you mean (and this is the only way I think I can understand this statement) is that some art can be reduced to mathematics, I agree. As a matter of fact, all art can be reduced to mathematics. But this should be no surprise, since we live in a mathematical world where, as it happens, everything can be reduced to mathematics.

And what if the mathematical representations of string theory were translated into one of these traditional artistic media? By analogy, the “music” would be the representation of the reality, much as the equations describe the universe in physical science.

This would amount to a sophisticated method of encoding the equations for superstrings. Certainly one could call such a sequence of sounds "music". But if one did this, one would also have to be willing to call a book containing the equations for superstrings "literature".

But then perhaps I am old-fashioned in thinking that the purpose of music is to sound good.

But unless one adopts a very strange view of art, one cannot escape the fact that the scientific impulse is vastly different from the artistic.

I don't think the Ainur were supposed to be encoding equations, based on some post-modernist idea about how to construct music. That is, within the context of Tolkien's legendarium, putting the cart before the horse. They were simply creating music - art - and the world formed thereby is thus fundamentally an artistic one.

Instead of the natural world creating humans, who develop art, Eru created the Ainur, who developed art, which created the natural world.