Music of the spheres
In a telling quotation early on in Lawrence Weschler’s “Waves Passing in the Night,” the author cites the great sound and film editor Walter Murch on the subject of blinking. Good actors, says Murch “blink between their character’s thoughts, the bad ones between their own, as when, nailing a reading, the bad actor blinks wondering whether the director registered how good they just were; with good actors the editing splice always occurs just before the blink.”
It’s not surprising to learn that Murch, a three-time Academy Award winner for his work on “Apocalypse Now” and “The English Patient” and widely heralded for his contributions to the “Godfather” films and others, is an astute and microscopically attentive analyst of his profession. The discovery here, in this short, richly suggestive and also somewhat exasperating book, is where else Murch’s keen and restless intelligence travels.
For over 20 years now, Murch has taken up the seemingly quixotic cause of TitiusBode, a long-discounted theory named for a pair of 18th century astronomers, about the orbital patterns and gravitational actions of the planets and their moons. Not only do the orbits conform to certain striking numerological patterns, Murch argues in defense of Titius-Bode, but the distances between those orbits map uncannily well to the notes in a musical scale — “the solar system as a whole,” as Weschler puts it, “constituting a single wide chord.”
Weschler, who serves as a kind of faithful amanuensis to Murch in the first half of the book, conducts the reader into relevant historical details, like the impact of Neptune’s discovery in 1846 and Pluto’s in 1930, along with some deep dives into astronomical studies. The text starts sprouting equations, an illustration of “compounding notional waves welling out from a central object” and statistical tables.
Weschler, a former staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of conversationswith books on the artists Robert Irwin and David Hockney among many other volumes, is a lucid explicator. Even so, the non-scientifically-inclined lay reader is likely to get pretty dizzy trying to follow Murch’s thinking into the weeds of his postulations, formulas and the accuracy calculations of his theory.
No sooner has “Waves Passing” marshaled Murch’s argument than it changes course and flows in a new direction. In Part Two, “Troughs and Swells,” Weschler gives sustained airtime to the critics, many of them openly dismissive. “Numerology,” sniffs one Caltech physicist. “He (Murch) selects data he needs to make things sort of fit,” says University of Arizona quantum optical physicist Charles Falco, “and tosses out data that doesn’t fit.” The words “nutty,” “amateurish” and “kooky” stud another skeptic’s remarks.
While Weschler provides Murch ample opportunity to respond, the real object of all this back and forth isn’t who’s right and who isn’t. (On that issue, one tends to side with the academics; Murch himself freely admits to his own possible “apophenia” — the tendency “of human beings to see patterns where there are no patterns.”)
The book’s overriding purpose is a spirited defense of the nonprofessional scientific inquisitor and what he or she has to contribute. Opening with George Bernard Shaw’s remark that “every profession is a conspiracy against the laity,” Weschler goes on to make a well-supported case against the constraining effects of mainstream academic science. “Hypermathematization,” grant-driven research and peer review power “a mechanism for older scientists to enforce direction on younger scientists” and “to discourage change,” according to Lee Smolin (“The Trouble with Physics”). String theory becomes emblematic of a physics so highly professionalized that even experts feel excluded. Margaret Wertheim is a physicist and science writer, “yet I struggle to understand general relativity. Any nonphysicist who says otherwise is not being honest.”
Weschler references such scorned and ultimately vindicated outsiders as Alfred Wegener, an early proponent of continental drift, and turns to the UC Irvine philosopher of science P. Kyle Stanford for the ringing assertion that “the wholesale rejection of alternative theories has repeatedly held back the process of vital science.” Weschler clearly sees Murch as a worthy participant in that tradition.
Elegant and propulsive as the book’s closing arguments are, the author is leisurely to the point of coyness in arriving at them. The opening fifth of the text is devoted to Murch’s parents, childhood and film career, all of which bears little on what follows. By spending half the book in respectful elucidation of Murch’s TitiusBode views, Weschler risks propping up a straw man for others to shoot down too avidly.
But “Waves Passing” rises admirably at the end, even as Murch re-enters to mount yet more, dauntingly technical evidence in his defense. A spreadsheet he sends to Weschler, the author notes drily, “went on for eight pages.”
Elliptically limned as it is — an email exchange here, a sushi dinner there — the relationship that unfolds here is a vigorous and invigorating meeting of two dynamically curious minds. That’s one discovery always worth making.
Steven Winn is the San Francisco Chronicle’s former arts and culture critic. Email: books@sfchronicle.com