Yeah go ahead and explain how learning Mandarin teaches you about Quantum Mechanics or how learning Music Theory helps you bake cakes. Cute idea that falls apart under casual inspection.
Music theory deals with the harmonic series, which studies the motion of sound waves [1]. Sound waves are physical, and are affected by the matter and density of the particles they are traveling in. To understand it deeply, you need to get into the behavior of solids and gases, which is chemistry, something useful to baking.
Similarly from Mandarin to Quantum Mechanics you can take
Mandarin -> linguistics -> Probability Theory[2] -> Quantum Probability -> Quantum Mechanics
This strains credulity. You do not by osmosis learn how to solve the wave equations or manipulate them by playing the Tuba.
What you are doing is connecting related fields however tangential they may be and implying that learning about one makes you learn about the others which is just not true. Let's take a Music Theory student and give them a series of problems from Landau and Lifshitz, how well do you think they will do?
I think that i'm illustrating the point of the author. That every field is connected with every other field. If you start getting into the harmonic series as a music theory nerd, you will be aided by studying physics and chemistry. Maybe your average music student wouldn't but John Coltrane certainly did draw these types of connections.
Music Theory and cake baking are both all about strict proportion. (and therefore the pythagorean comma would be the equivalent to how few sigfigs we need to keep when converting recipes in freedom units to g and kg?)
You are confused, you are learning arithmetic to help you understand recipes. Knowing that water plus yeast plus flour in a certain proportion = bread does not teach you how to compose music and vice versa.
