Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean

A theoretical physicist takes us on an awe-inspiring journey from relativity to the Higgs field, showing how the universe creates everything from what seems like nothing at all

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.

Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 03/05/2024
Pages: 384
ISBN: 9781541603295


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/15/2024
Publishers Weekly 01/22/2024

About the Author
Matthew Strassler is a theoretical physicist, blogger, and writer whose research often takes him to the Large Hadron Collider. An associate of the Harvard University Physics Department and a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, he was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Rutgers University. He lives in rural Massachusetts.