Swimming against the tide: Lawrence Weschler on 'Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of Astrophysicists'

April 14, 2017 9 AM PT

Walter Murch, one of Hollywood’s most accomplished film and sound editors, whose illustrious career includes nine Oscar nominations and three wins, also has quite the set of extracurricular interests. Over the years, when he hasn’t been working behind the scenes on essential 20^th century viewing such as “Apocalypse Now” and the “Godfather” films, he’s been translating Malaparte from Italian, pondering the pyramids and, as his most recent work on the documentary “Particle Fever” might suggest, solving the mysteries of the universe. Maybe.

It’s Murch as outsider astrophysicist that Lawrence Weschler takes as the subject of his latest book “Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of Astrophysicists.” As much a meditation on the question of who, in fact, should be permitted to address humanity’s biggest questions, the book unfurls Murch’s intriguing, 20-years-in-the-making theory (a retooling of the contentious Titius-Bode) before embarking on a quest to gain Murch audience with the very scientific community that dismisses him. To take Weschler’s wave metaphor, Murch is paddling against the tide; for every stroke forward he makes in his own findings, the prevailing science is ready to beat him back to shore.

Although an outsider, Murch’s theory is a complex physics proposition, and Weschler, to his credit, follows him at every turn. “One of my mottos as a journalist and as a teacher,” he said over the phone from New York, was “receive them ignorant; dispatch them confused.” Mission accomplished, although, an extension of his authority as a sound editor — “an acoustician” — Murch’s theory is elegant, and the book is an accessible investigation of the question of who gets to say what.

See Weschler talking about “Waves Passing in the Night” at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on the panel Nonfiction: Science and Our World at 3:30 p.m. April 22. »

I asked Weschler to break it all down. We discussed standing waves, dark matter and when, if at all, Walter Murch sleeps. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

If Walter Murch is an amateur astrophysicist, the rest of us are amateur amateurs. Can you give a simplified taste of what it is that Murch is proposing?

Let’s put it this way: He’s interested in the relative distances of the planets from the sun, in our case, or of the moons from their planets — how they line up, how they array themselves.

There was this theory [Titius-Bode] that had been advanced back in the 18^th century and completely discredited. It was a particularly ungainly looking formula, and Walter started by figuring out why it was so ungainly and correcting it. But the particular thing that Walter contributed, being an acoustician — being the guy, who, for example, when you go see a film that says “Dolby 5.1,” he’s the guy that came up with Dolby 5.1 — he noticed that the revised formula had within it the formula for octaves. It’s not like if you were in outer space and you listened there’s actually sound going on — but there seems to be a pattern of higher frequencies and lower frequencies the same way there is in music. So it seems as if there are in fact gravitational undulations.

The notion that there’s something harmonic in the placement of things is something that hasn’t been noticed in this particular way, and at least seems to be worth looking at, however, easier said than done.

Indeed, convincing the scientific community that his theory is worth entertaining proves to be a serious challenge. (The second half of the book begins, “few of the astrophysicists I now began trying to speak with, however, were in any sort of entertaining mood.”) If Murch’s theory is so compelling, why is it dismissed?

First of all, Titius-Bode, the theory, just has cooties. Nobody wants to get close to it. It’s a career killer. But in fairness, astrophysicists get letters all the time from people who’ve figured out the universe. In Los Angeles there’s the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which I wrote about in “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” and they have an entire display that is given over to the letters that people sent to the astronomers at Mt. Wilson back around 1900 and 1910. So on the one hand, these people get incredible amounts of letters, on the other, it is factually the case that science has become much more technical, much more mathematical and much more siloed.

The wider issue, and the more interesting issue to me, is that the whole idea of professional scientists is only 75 years, 100 years old. Back in the 19^th century and forever before that, there were no professionals — Darwin was not a professional, he was an amateur. Mendel was a monk. Everybody had day jobs, you know? These were all people who were doing this out of love. And what’s very distressing to me is the way that science is now so incredibly specialized, especially cosmology, whose whole function is to explain the order of the universe to human beings. It is now so mathematicised that nobody can understand what they’re saying. The thing that I find interesting about Walter is that he’s every bit as much an acoustician as they are astrophysicists, and he may have found a different metaphor for thinking about these things.

If Murch is right, what would his metaphor illuminate? What, in the end, would it mean?

At one extreme, the one that would get him a Nobel Prize, if he’s right about this is behaving as if it were a standing wave, remember those standing waves?… What it suggests is that the emptiness of space isn’t empty. Walter won’t make this claim, but it is implicit in what he’s saying. If there is no other explanation that accounts for these kinds of patterns, if the patterns aren’t just dismissed, then one possibility is that it’s a standing wave in something, and then the question is: What is it a standing wave in? One candidate would be dark matter, which has otherwise hasn’t been found. I’m not making a case that this has to be right. Neither is Walter. The first person who raises the possibility that he may be wrong is Walter himself. He offers that word “apophenia,” the tendency of human beings to see patterns where there are no patterns. He says over and over again, “Maybe I’m just seeing patterns where there are none.”

One of the astrophysicists you spoke to, Alan Duffy, proposed a similar counterargument that I found very compelling. “The link to music,” he said, “is a beautiful analogy but you get the same pattern of harmonic overtones … because of the underlying beauty in mathematics (in this case geometric progression.)” Did you find this, or other arguments, equally persuasive?

I thought the best criticism is that if you’re going to start countenancing this kind of thing, you’re a half-step away from climate change deniers, anti-vaccine fanatics and so forth. Just a few days ago a guy named Baynard Woods published a piece where he talked about the difference between cynicism and skepticism, and that the very heart of science is skepticism — you’re always going to test stuff again and again and again — as opposed to just cynicism, which rejects things categorically and ideologically. Walter is a model of the beauty of skepticism, without falling into the same bag as cynics who are just climate changing deniers because they’re not going to listen to evidence no matter what.

Something that I nurture in my readers is the ability to think two contradictory thoughts at the same time. It could be true that one shouldn’t do this lightly, because you undermine belief in science at a time when science is really under attack — that is completely true — but it’s also possible that Walter’s right! Both of those things could be true!

I started to think of this book as “a man obsessed with a man obsessed.” While Walter would like an audience with astrophysicists, he’s not rabid for validation, nor does he come across as feeling “wronged.” It occurred to me that the person most committed to gaining an audience for his theory is you. What about Walter’s obsession obsessed you?

This is the third volume of what is now a trilogy — “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” “Boggs: A Comedy of Values” — and now this one. In all three cases you are dealing with people who became obsessed. One of my themes, generally, is passion pieces. People that were moseying along in the dailyness of their lives, and caught fire. I love watching people become passionately engaged and do beautiful work. This is another one of those stories. There is this kind of Zen, 10-thousand mile stare that Walter can do. When you talk about somebody else having a 10-thousand mile stare it’s that they’re not interested. He’s actually looking at something 10 thousand miles away.

You’ve known Walter Murch for nearly two decades. How did you meet?

We’ve been trying to remember. In those days I was running the N.Y. Institute for the Humanities and I was also the artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival at the same time. One of the things I loved to do was what I called Wonder Cabinets, which would just be all day long, one cool thing after another, and fairly on in our relationship I had him give an early version of his presentation. We’re similar in that we both have completely all-over-place interests and delights. Over the years I’ve been following his developments. “Look, here’s how Jupiter’s moons line up,” and then a year later he’ll tell me, “Look, Saturn’s moons are doing this.” So I was following along and waiting for a time to write about it.

Why this book now?

Suddenly, for the first time in the century, almost, the word Titius-Bode showed up in a scientific paper and it became possible to talk about this without people laughing you off the stage. But at any given time I’m working on five or six projects. What happened here is that I have a major project that I’m supposed to be working on, which is a biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks, and for various reasons I was blocked on it, and I responded to the blockage by writing two books [“Waves Passing in the Night” and “The Art of Ramiro Gomez.”]

Wow, I wish that’s how I responded to being blocked. Murch too comes across as almost impossibly engaged, impossibly productive. I was as mind-boggled by questions about the universe as I was by this conundrum: When does Walter Murch sleep?

Good question. When he’s supposed to be sleeping he’s reading science. He decompresses by reading science, and that’s in two senses — he decompresses from the tension of being focused on editing completely, but he also decompresses from the craziness, and the crazy arbitrary contingencies, that characterize the life of anyone working on a film in Hollywood. Those contingencies can be so frustrating, and yet there’s something about the world of science for him that is a reprieve, a kind of an idyll.

There’s freedom that comes from being an outsider. Your book reminded me of that, and of the pleasures, and on occasion, the benefits of being a passionate amateur. It’s awe-inspiring, and a little overwhelming.

If you get to a point where you really, profoundly don’t know what’s going to happen next — if you have a very clear view of fog — you’re probably getting to about the point where you should be. The more you’re able to say something with absolute clarity, the more likely you’re probably wrong, because in fact the world is very confusing.

You’ve known Walter Murch for nearly two decades. How did you meet?

Why this book now?

agatha.french@latimes.com

@agathafrenchy