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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Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.
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All About What We Know About the Universe - ALL
- By J.B. on 02-17-17
By: Michael A. Strauss, and others
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My Big TOE: Discovery
- Book Two of a Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics
- By: Thomas Campbell
- Narrated by: Thomas Campbell
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Section 3 develops the interface and interaction between we the people and our digital consciousness reality. It derives and explains the characteristics, origins, dynamics, and function of ego, love, and free will. It derives our larger purpose. Finally, Section 3 develops the psi uncertainty principle as it explains and interrelates psi phenomena, free will, love, consciousness evolution, reality, human purpose, entropy and physics.
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A guidebook to a bigger reality & realization
- By Diana on 11-27-13
By: Thomas Campbell
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Your Brain Is a Time Machine
- The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
- By: Dean Buonomano
- Narrated by: Aaron Abano
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In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.
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Great book on an underrated subject
- By Neuron on 05-09-17
By: Dean Buonomano
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Inspired
- How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition
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- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
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How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.
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Great book, terrible audio wanted to ask a refund
- By Srikanth Ramanujam on 11-15-18
By: Marty Cagan
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What listeners say about Waves in an Impossible Sea
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- Lee Ann Moyer
- 12-09-24
Thought provoking
This is a thought provoking book. I read Professor Strassler’s blog Of Particular Significance and also loved his recent interview with Brian Keating. I enjoyed the musical analogies. The work is presented without the math so amateur enthusiasts of astrophysics can enjoy and learn. Great job!
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-12-24
A Wonderful & Simple Explanation of Mass & Energy
I've been looking for this book for quite some time, a great book for a simple & easily understood explanation of mass & energy. My education is as an engineer, but my passion is in QFT. I have several books by Sean Carrol, Frank Wilczek & Carlo Rovelli, all great books by great authors, but this book has, what to me, is a very comfortably explanation of the interaction of the Higgs field to other quantum fields & the resulting mass & energy. The narration is excellent. Mr. Grove's pronunciation is clear as a bell. Can't recommend this book enough. Will certainly purchase any future books by Prof. Strassler.
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- Mark
- 01-14-25
No pdf
Throughout the book there are references to a pdf file that is not available from audible. One must do a search on the title to be taken to the author's web page to find the pdf. Not cool, unacceptable. The pdf should be available in the audible app to view as one is listening. I'm sure money is involved in this decision to omit the pdf. Had I known this ahead of time, I would have passed on this title.
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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