Murch Walter - Waves passing in the night: Walter Murch in the land of the astrophysicists

Walter Murch astride the Greenwich Meridian, 2016

OVERTURE

FOR MORE THAN twenty years now, when he hasnt been doing anything else, Walter Murch has been tightening the bolts on his theory of gravitational astro-acoustics and refining the ever-more-accomplished PowerPoint across which he occasionally presents it before one august (albeit initially often quite dubious) audience or another. When doing anything else, more often than not he has simply been being Walter Murch, which is to say, at age seventy-three, arguably the most celebrated and admired film and sound editor in the world (nominated for nine Academy Awards and the winner of three; veteran of such classics as THX 1138, the Godfather films, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, Cold Mountain, and, most recently, the Large Hadron Collider documentary Particle Fever). If he turns out to be right about that cockamamie theory of his, however, he may yet find himself in the running for a prize altogether grander than any Oscar.

But thats a big ifor rather, a big double-if. To begin with, whether he is in fact right about his theory, but even more immediately pressing, whether he can get anyone in the close-knit and largely closed-in community of professional astrophysicists even to give him, a rank outsider, and his unorthodox theory the time of day. Recently, however, there has been a slight if potentially momentous chink in the wholesale rejection of the kind of thinking Murch is advancing from within that very astrophysical community (of which more anon), such that the game at long last may actually be afoot.

PART ONE

Distant Music

MURCH LAUNCHES THE most recent iteration of his PowerPoint lecture (actually, these days he uses Keynote, though I myself have been hearing versions of this lecture for a good dozen years now, whenever I happened to be engaging Murch on a wide variety of other topics) by noting how there was a time, not that long ago, when the sort of thinking he is engaging in here (far from outlandish) was the very epitome of orthodox. From Pythagorean antiquity through the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, all learned gentlemen (and they were all mainly gentlemen) were steeped in the fourfold classical curriculum known as the quadrivium, which is to say, arithmetic (pure number), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).