The Uncanny Mathematics Udergirding The Egyptian Pyramids

As we have already seen in the current series, Walter Murch is a man of many parts. Moving on from that interest in the rampant appearance of golden ratios across faces and screens which he displayed our last time out, this time the eminent film and sound editor will be delving into a wider and more longterm sidebar passion of his: deciphering the uncanny mathematics undergirding the Egyptian pyramids and the possible significance of those astonishingly exacting proportions. It’s not just the way that across an astonishingly brief period (the 120 years from 2624 through 2504 BC) the bronze-age Egyptians managed to fashion over 20 million tons of limestone and granite blocks into five structures taller than any that would be matched anywhere in the world across the ensuing almost 4500 years, indeed right up until the middle of the last century—it’s that their engineers and designers did so, or so Murch has come to believe and will endeavor to demonstrate, within a strict dimensional regime blending pi and phi (that selfsame golden ratio) which they then secretly embedded in a mysterious chamber buried deep in the heart of the pyramid, one that was decidedly not (as has often been assumed) the pharaoh’s burial chamber. But if it wasn’t that, what was it? and why?

Besides being the legendary sound and film editor behind such classics as the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient, Walter Murch has long pursued all manner of marvelous side passions: transposing the uncanny journalism of the Italian midcentury master Curzio Malaparte into English poetry; resurrecting long-abandoned theories of gravitational astroacoustics (subject of Weschler’s recent book, Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists); determining on a per volume basis which exudes more energy , the human brain of the sun (you’d be surprised, by a factor of 50,000 times!); chronicling the art of his eminent painter father, Walter Tandy Murch; and now, approaching his own eightieth year, completing Suddenly Something Clicked, a combination memoir cum successor to his seminal 1995 meditation on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye.
This conversation is part of the series “Mr. Weschler’s Cabinet of Wonders,” as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.