Hi Jonathan Bain,
woa 9 years it's a very long PhD. Im smoothly approaching to complete my manuscript, it's around 3 years in my country for scientific PhD. About following the scientific method I would say it depends on your research topic, however things are getting more complicated since we are living in a world where everything has to come as fast as possible like "if you want a permanent position you need to publish a lot, if not so you'll perish". I am against this because that forces everyone to not follow the scientific method and that's why I'll do something else after my PhD. I checked you homepage a little bit, it's very audacious to question the Big-Bang, relativity and black holes, I'll check later all your arguments since my manuscript and all other things Im doing already take a lot of my time, but I'll be glad to talk to you later about this.
Concerning the link between music writing and music I can give you two answers:
- As a first approximation I like to cite Robert Boyle experience. He takes a vase with a bell inside, make vacuum inside it and shake the vase. There's no sound. After letting the air entering inside the vase he shakes it again and the bell sounds, as we all know it the sound need a environment to propagate. The space is empty, then no sound propagates. This first answer tells you that there's no links between music and astrophysics can't mix together.
- However when you're making Astrophysics observations or simulations you manipulates signals that you plot over the wavelength or frequency. These signals can be transposed to make them audible by human ears. Basically with a computer you transform signal from the light into a sound or make the opposite transfomation. In other words you sonicate the signal. Then you listen to the nature although the sound doesn't propagate. For instance there's a numerical simulation of two black holes fusion producing a sound that looks like a rise effect. When you make a music you are also producing a signal over the frequencies. Then my final answer after thinking about it is YES music and astrophysics (more generally science) are perfectly linked and I guess you can describe the nature with sounds.
I France there's a famous cosmologist that made a lot of projects that mix science and music. Here's his Wikipedia page:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Philippe_Uzan
If you don't understand french google translate is you best friend
I had the opportunity to meet him and attended to 2 seminars when he associates music and science. You can easily find his e-mail on the internet, he will give you his point of view wih obviously more details than me.
See ya,
RD