Pulitzer Prize nominee Lawrence Weschler and Academy Award–winning sound and film editor Walter Murch read from and discuss Weschler’s new profile of Murch, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists. Film legend Murch is an amateur astrophysicist whose investigations could reshape our understanding of 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; Boggs: A Comedy of Values; and Everything that Rises.

Walter Murch is arguably the most admired sound and film editor in the world for his work on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather trilogy, The English Patient, and many other films. Beyond film, he has had a decades-long passion for astrophysics. In particular, he has worked on the rehabilitation of Titius-Bode, a long-discredited eighteenth- century theory regarding the patterns by which planets and moons array themselves in gravitational systems across the universe. Persevering in the highest traditions of outsider science, Murch has made advances that even some professional astrophysicists find intriguing, including a connection between Titius-Bode and earlier notions of musical harmony in the heavens.