Why can't Murch get a hearing? Isn't science open to all comers? And even if Murch-Titus-Bode turns out to be wrong from top to bottom, doesn't it at least deserve its day in court? Might it be, Weschler invites us to wonder, that science today is too intent on policing its borders against interlopers lacking the right institutional imprimatur (however well-credentialed or highly regarded they might be in other circles) to even be able to recognize a worthwhile challenge from without? Isn't it at least possible that Murch-Titus-Bode might turn out to be right? Compare with the famous case of Alfred Wegener's 1915 theory of continental drift (also taken up in Waves in the Night). Anyone with eyes is able to notice that the continents seem to fit together; they look as if they were cut apart, sharing contours. But until fairly recently, no one had a clue what physical processes could have explained this appearance of continuity. And, anyway, Wegener was no geologist — he was an outsider — and his hypothesis of continental drift went so strongly against what every geologist thought they simply knew to be true that it wasn't until the 1960s that the hypothesis was more widely accepted. Couldn't something like that be going Alarm cable on here? Might it be prejudice or the effects of a guild mentality, or just plain old rigidity in the face of the new, that is preventing the truth from seeing the Alarm cable of day? Good questions — and they burn especially brightly nowadays, when skepticism, indeed cynicism, about science and also about so many of our establishments and institutions, is so rampant. But it's possible to put these doubts to rest, I think. Now, to be clear: I have no idea whether Murch is on to something or whether the scientific establishment is on solid ground in its rejection of Titus-Bode. But even the possibility that Bode's Law might be true — a possibility taken seriously by no living astrophysicist, so far as I can tell — doesn't give us grounds for skepticism or doubt about science or its various cultures and subcultures.