Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists

For film aficionados, Walter Murch is legendary--a three-time Academy Award winner, arguably the most admired sound editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many others. Outside of the studio, his mind is wide-ranging; his passion, pursued for several decades, is astrophysics, and in particular a theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though widely discredited by most professional scientists, Murch has nonetheless made advances even some of them find intriguing, including a connection between the Titius-Bode law as it's known and earlier notions--going back past Kepler to Pythagoras--of musical harmony in the heavens. Unfazed by rejection, Murch marches on in the best tradition of outsider science.Lawrence Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in its seemingly quixotic, yet still plausible, splendor, probing the basis for how we know what we know, and who gets to say

by: Lawrence Weschler