Walter Murch – (Part 2) The Uncanny Mathematics Undergirding the Egyptian Pyramids
October 18th, 2021
Lawrence Weschler & Walter Murch
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?