Philip Sheppard

Tag: science

  • Study of Life

    Darwin_sketch[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/99216818″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]Study of Life – a new track by Philip Sheppard. (solo clarinet by Pete Furniss)

    I’m rather obsessed with other people’s notebooks. This image is an extract from Darwin’s notes concerning the variations in evolution of finches – core research upon the way to his extraordinary theories of evolution.

    I’d like to think that if he’d had a computer (maybe something crafted by Mr Babbage…) he would still have laid everything out in ink, on fine paper first.

    It’s so much easier to think in ink. Do you have a favourite journal?

    I love Darwin’s ‘I think’ at the top of the page…

  • Fantastic Mr Feynman

    richard-feynman

    This Sunday sees the broadcast of Chris Riley’s wonderful account of the life of one of the great thinkers & polymaths of our time, Richard Feynman. I’ve written the music for the film. Here’s are a couple of tracks from the score;[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/91542152″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /][soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/91544836″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    Feynman brilliantly embraced the concept of playing – playing with ideas until they resolved into simple models of extraordinary concepts.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyqleIxXTpw&feature=youtu.be]“But when it came time to do some research. I couldn’t get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!… And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”… Then I had another thought; Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics…. So I get this new attitude… I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever. Withing a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air…. I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate… And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ‘playing’ – working, really – with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos; my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly…. There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.” –

    Richard Feynman, excerpts from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman

    feynman.jpg-large

  • Across the Milky way

    milky way

    Here’s a track I wrote formerly for a programme called ‘Inside the Milky Way’. I’m gradually reworking the soundtrack for this series into fully developed pieces and releasing them on Bandcamp. Click here for more!

    The image above is taken from a photo I took of a bowl my dear friend Josh Simpson made for me. He’s a total genius, and by coincidence has a strong space connection as his wife is Cmdr Cady Coleman, the astronaut!