
Waves in an Impossible Sea
How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Grove
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By:
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Matt Strassler
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 BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
On December 7, 1941, as the great battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and Utah lie paralyzed and burning in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A crack team of U.S. Navy salvage divers headed by Edward C. Raymer are hurriedly flown to Oahu from the mainland. Their two-part orders are direct and straightforward: (1) rescue as many trapped sailors and Marines as possible, and (2) resurrect what remains of America's once mighty pacific fleet. Descent Into Darkness tells their story.
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A Massive Disappointment
- By Matthew on 10-14-15
By: Edward C. Raymer
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Space Oddities
- The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe
- By: Harry Cliff
- Narrated by: Harry Cliff
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. After decades of fruitless searching, could we finally be catching glimpses of a profound new view of our physical world? Or are we being fooled by cruel tricks of the data? In Space Oddities, Harry Cliff, a physicist who does cutting-edge work on the Large Hadron Collider, provides a riveting look at the universe’s most confounding puzzles.
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as compelling as a mystery novel and very informative
- By jimpgh@aol.com on 04-22-24
By: Harry Cliff
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Written in Bone
- Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind
- By: Sue Black
- Narrated by: Sue Black
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence. Now in this book, Black builds on that memoir, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones.
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A very human story by a very believable human
- By Gary on 09-21-21
By: Sue Black
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The Treeline
- The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth
- By: Ben Rawlence
- Narrated by: Jamie Parker
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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For the last 50 years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents, and trees confronting huge geological changes.
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A surprising find
- By BearheartRaven on 02-23-22
By: Ben Rawlence
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The Human Tide
- How Population Shaped the Modern World
- By: Paul Morland
- Narrated by: Zeb Soanes
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise and fall of the British Empire; the emergence of America as a superpower; the ebb and flow of global challenges from Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. These are the headlines of history, but they cannot be properly grasped without understanding the role that population has played. The Human Tide shows how periods of rapid population transition - a phenomenon that first emerged in the British Isles but gradually spread across the globe - shaped the course of world history.
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dry
- By Ralph C. on 05-02-19
By: Paul Morland
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Crossing the Borders of Time
- A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed
- By: Leslie Maitland
- Narrated by: Leslie Maitland
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees—the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before immigrating to New York.
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I didn't want it to end..absolutely wonderful!
- By Ellen on 05-07-12
By: Leslie Maitland
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Mapping the Deep
- Innovation, Exploration, and the Dive of a Lifetime
- By: Dawn J. Wright, Kathryn D. Sullivan - foreword
- Narrated by: Gwen Steel, Dawn J. Wright
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Oceanographer Dawn Wright made history in 2022 when she became the first Black person to visit Challenger Deep, the deepest and most unexplored place on Earth—a trip that took her over 10,000 meters beneath the Pacific Ocean’s surface. We know less about the ocean floor than we do about the surface of the moon. To date, barely one-fifth of the seabed has been mapped in high resolution. As an ocean scientist and explorer, Dawn has made it her mission to change that.
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Narrator sounds like AI
- By Kindle Customer on 02-16-25
By: Dawn J. Wright, and others
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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them
- A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity
- By: Antonio Padilla
- Narrated by: Antonio Padilla
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works.
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Exciting, Strange, Difficult = Meh
- By Michael on 05-23-23
By: Antonio Padilla
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Metazoa
- Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind
- By: Peter Godfrey-Smith
- Narrated by: Mitch Riley, Peter Godfrey-Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.
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Philosophy Meets Biology
- By aaron on 01-22-21
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The River of Consciousness
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Kate Edgar
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A collection of essays that displays Oliver Sacks' passionate engagement with the most compelling and seminal ideas of human endeavor: evolution, creativity, memory, time, consciousness, and experience. The River of Consciousness is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.
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Important but Less Interesting
- By Michael on 11-16-17
By: Oliver Sacks
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Lost in Math
- How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
- By: Sabine Hossenfelder
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: Observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria.
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A rare glimpse into the inner world of physics
- By Joe on 12-08-18
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A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
- 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters
- By: Henry Gee
- Narrated by: Henry Gee
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor. In A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor.
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incredibly annoying
- By A reader on 12-22-21
By: Henry Gee
thought provoking
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Very well written
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The physics made understandable
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fascinating, intuitive, and eye-opening
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Thought provoking
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A Wonderful & Simple Explanation of Mass & Energy
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Having said that, I'm glad I did not. The authors focus on a field centric view in physics is a welcome departure from the norm. He has managed to force my brain to take a different view of things I already don't understand.
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