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

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 249 ratings

Price: 18.37

Last update: 12-18-2024


About this item

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.


Top reviews from the United States

  • The Experimentalist
    5.0 out of 5 stars One of a kind!
    Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2024
    I'm a very old Ph.D. experimental physicist who missed out on quantum field theory. After 50 years in aerospace, I'm back studying physics. I bought this book because I was impressed by a Quanta article based on it. All I can say is, "Wow!" Would I like more math? Of course. But this is a very impressive effort to deliver a sense of what QFT is, and its implications, without math beyond the middle school level. It takes a lot of self confidence for an author to lay it all out there without a math smoke screen to hide behind. His descriptions are so straight-forward, direct, and clear that there's nowhere to hide. I particularly appreciated his description of the role of the Higgs field. For me, this kind of introduction is extremely helpful before taking on the math. I get a sense of the lay of the land and the shape of the forest before walking in among the trees and then diving into the weeds.

    The book is not just about QFT. There are all sorts of particle physics and cosmology insights in the offing too.

    I'll admit that I was more than halfway through the book before encountering much that I didn't already know. From that point on, though, there was one revelation after another. The first half of the book is there to get the less-technical reader oriented and prepared. As a result, the book can take a reader from nowhere to a new appreciation of the universe. That is a huge achievement by the author.

    If there's any bad news, it's that you have to almost finish the book to appreciate the title. I'm concerned that the title doesn't give much of an inkling of what the book covers. I hope the word gets out to the people that are interested.

    As an aside, I spend a little time each day answering questions on Quora. This book answers about two dozen of Quora's most common questions on physics. It really does cover a lot that people are curious about.

    I can't recommend this book enough. Congratulations to the author!
  • Pat
    5.0 out of 5 stars Informative and Interesting
    Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2024
    This is the best book so far for someone seeking to understand Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Theory. I've read books over the years that try to explain using mathematics, or historical events, or by following individual researchers, or comics, or experimental outcomes. None have done a very good job for the uninitiated. Strassler uses examples of common experiences to lift the veil on quantum theory. Seriously, this is a milestone book in Physics education
  • A reader
    4.0 out of 5 stars Repetitive but up to date
    Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2024
    Three main negatives. (1) The writing is often repetitive, even within the span of a paragraph or a few. So, one is forced to ask whether anything is new/different in the repeats (it’s not), which is maddeningly confusing. Repeating for no apparent reason is a violation of the implicit contract between writer and reader. (2) Where’s the discussion of doublets, gauge theory, Lie algebras and groups, and so forth? Trying to avoid math has made the presentation here “simpler than is possible.” (3) As a result, some of the main pieces of the subject are omitted or reduced to passing mentions—for example, W+, W-, Z0, the actual definitions of boson and fermion, the role of neutrinos.

    Five main positives. (1) What is explained is eventually explained quite clearly. That was Strassler’s stated goal, and he succeeds. (2) The book explains the role of kinetic energy as the source of most of the mass of a proton or neutron—see pp. 118-119. (3) At the end of the book one has an up-to-date picture of what is currently known vs. not known, and of what is currently being investigated. This is a real win and made me glad that I read the book. (4) Strassler maintains an admirable neutrality about current hypotheses such as string theory (likewise supersymmetry, if one goes off to his website). I was pleased to see this. (5) The book has extensive endnotes, which provide useful breadcrumbs to further information. These five positives add up to a lot.

    The book covers the Higgs field, and Higgs boson, at length.

    There is a good glossary, which could be more wide-ranging, and a good index. A bibliography for further info would be nice.

    I think that readers who are not freaked out by a fair amount of (well-explained) math — even if they do not have a strong math background — would probably find Bruce Schumm’s book, “Deep Down Things,” to be considerably more satisfactory. But Schumm’s book is now twenty years old, so I think that following it up with Strassler’s book would be useful to get a picture of the current state of the research.
  • Thomas Delaney
    5.0 out of 5 stars Impressive Accomplishment
    Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2024
    You know what is impossible? To describe to the layman the latest developments in theoretical physics.

    So usually the topic has to be "dumbed down" to such an extent that it is almost silly. Particles and waves and fields and uncertainty principles and time dilation and quantum entanglement and relativistic gravitational effects, and what not. You might as well be reading Harry Potter.

    So I think this book is about close an anyone can get to explaining the dizzying complexity of modern physics to a John Q Public audience. And I have a read a lot of pop-sci physics books, and most of them are pretty boring - a rehash of old platitudes. I think I might have actually learned something new with this one.

    So well worth the read.

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