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

A Harvard 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 Matthew Strassler tells an unexpected story about space, particles, and ourselves. If you drive at highway speeds with the windows down, you feel the wind beating against your face. Yet our planet moves through space at over 100 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can this be, especially when, as we have known since Einstein, space and matter interact?

The answer, Strassler reveals, is that we are more than mere objects moving through emptiness. Instead, space is like a sea--albeit one that seems paradoxically odd. Much as the ocean has waves, space too has waves, of various types, and we, made from those waves, can move through space as silently and effortlessly as waves can cross an ocean. Beginning with the basics of motion, Strassler describes the relationships between mass, fields, forces, and the quantum world to show how all things, familiar and unfamiliar, emerge from what seems at first like nothing at all.

Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe.