
Walter Murch: The legendary film editor on underlying patterns in the cosmos - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/ingenious-walter-murch
======
rtl49
>“Bode’s law,” formulated in the 18th century, which holds that planets and
moons orbit their hosts at predictable mathematical ratios.

I think this is a very unclear description of the "Bode's law" hypothesis. How
does an object orbit another at a ratio? Thankfully Wikipedia provides a much
more sensible explanation. (Also, is "host" really a term used by astronomers
for orbited celestial bodies? With respect to the Sun, is Earth a "guest," or
maybe a "parasite?")

Perhaps I'm just picky, but this piece strikes me as rather "fluffy." Murch
shares very little in the way of concrete or actionable thinking. There's a
lot of praise and little justification for it. Generally speaking I dislike
interviews of this sort: even James Lipton doesn't stroke the ego quite so
much while requiring so little of his guests. There also seems to be a certain
desperation here to arrive at the conclusion that the humanities have a
meaningful contribution to make toward a scientific or objective understanding
of the universe.

~~~
fractallyte
The Wikipedia article sadly neglects to mention the work of mathematician Mary
Blagg in the early 20th century
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Adela_Blagg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Adela_Blagg)),
and the in-depth examination by Michael Martin Nieto in the 1970s.

That's a significant oversight; Nieto himself pointed out how a kind of
cultural 'momentum' in the scientific community kept the old, obsolete ideas
in vogue, while more thorough work was ignored. Heck, on this topic, even my
undergraduate astrophysics text was a couple of centuries out of date!

------
fernly
Some of us first heard of Bode's Law[0] in childhood in the late 1950s, from
reading Heinlein's "Time for the Stars"[1]. I have never forgotten a throw-
away remark by one of the characters, when Earth's first-ever starship has for
the first time entered a different planetary system, to the effect that "the
astronomer types upstairs are all excited because the orbits here fit Bode's
Law."

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_for_the_Stars)

