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

Written by Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
Read by Christopher Grove
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps

Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
By Matt Strassler
Narrated by Christopher Grove

Release date: 09-24-24
Language: English
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
Publisher: HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Categories: Science & Engineering

About this listen

A theoretical physicist takes listeners 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.

©2024 Matthew J. Strassler (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books