Waves in an Impossible Sea
How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
-
-
4.4 • 13 Ratings
-
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
Big Think's Best Science Book of 2024
A theoretical physicist takes readers on an awe-inspiring journey—found in "no other book" (Science)—to discover how the universe generates everything from nothing at all: "If you want to know what's really going on in the realms of relativity and particle physics, read this book" (Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe).
In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter?
The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one. Much like water and air, it ripples in various ways, and we ourselves, made from its ripples, can move through space as effortlessly as waves crossing an ocean. Deftly weaving together daily experience and fundamental physics—the musical universe, the enigmatic quantum, cosmic fields, and the Higgs boson—Strassler shows us how all things, familiar and unfamiliar, emerge from what seems like nothing at all.
Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvard University theoretical physicist Strassler debuts with a mind-bending investigation of "how the most esoteric-seeming physics affects every aspect of human existence." Examining what makes mass possible, Strassler explains that though atoms are mostly "empty space," humans "don't sink through the Earth" because "two atoms cannot occupy the same space without the addition of a lot of energy." The author devotes much of the volume to correcting oversimplifications of physics concepts, as when he notes that the common description of protons as "made merely of two up quarks and one down quark" is an "antiquated idea from the 1960s," with more recent research revealing that protons also contain "strange quarks," anti-quarks, and gluons, the latter of which help draw the proton's particles together. Strassler strives to make the physics accessible through the use of helpful analogies ("Whereas atoms are elegant ballrooms, protons are chaotic dance floors," he writes, emphasizing the energy and movement of protons' constituent particles), but the nuanced discussions are still difficult to follow for anyone without a background in the subject (indirect interactions between Higgs and electromagnetic fields, Strassler observes, "rely on the quantum uncertainty of the top quark field and are possible only in a universe with a cosmic certainty limit"). This is tough going, but the enlightening science is worth the effort.
