WAVES PASSING IN THE NIGHT

A thrilling ride through physical and mathematical space, Weschler describes Walter Murch and his celestial theories through perception, cognition, music, physics and astronomy. For film buffs, Walter Murch was a three-time Academy Award winner, the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Trilogy, The English Patient and many others. Outside of the studio his passion was, for several decades, astrophysics, in particular the rehabilitation of the Titius-Bode, a long-discredited 18th century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Though as a consummate outsider he had a hard time attracting any sort of comprehensive hearing from professional scientists, Murch has made advances that even some of them find intriguing including a connection between Titius-Bode and earlier notions, going back past Kepler and Pythagoras - of musical harmony in the heavens. Unphased by rejection, Weschler brings Murch's quest alive in all its quixotic, plausible splendour. Written for the general reader. 166 pages with charts and illus.