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. "The wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the progress of vital science," Weschler observes, citing early twentieth-century German amateur Alfred Wegener, whose speculations about continental drift were ridiculed at first, only to be accepted as fact years later. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin says "It is controversy that brings science alive"--and Murch's quest does that in spades. His fascination with the way the planets and their moons are arranged opens up the field of celestial mechanics for general readers, sparking an awareness of the vast and (to us) invisible forces constantly at play in the universe.

Lawrence Weschler is a critic, journalist, and author who was a staff writer at the New Yorker for more than twenty years. His books include Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, for which he was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Boggs: A Comedy of Values, and Everything That Rises, which received the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation, Salon, Truthdig, and Harper's, among others.