Sunday, December 5, 2010

The Wave Watcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

This nonfiction book is subtitled From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of LIfe's Undulations. So, with a title like that, how could I resist? Especially the "life's undulations" part. And that is exactly what the author talks about...waves of all kinds. About one-quarter of the information was over my head, it being physics and such, but so much was fascinating, relatively easy to understand and often funny. The illustrations were superb with photographs and paintings and diagrams. He would often also illustrate with quotations.

His previous book was The CloudSpotter's Guide, which I haven't read and didn't know existed. These books are not exactly best sellers; still, The Wave Watcher was chock full of interesting facts about water waves, light waves, sound waves and electromagnetic waves, etc. Gamma rays, for instance, are electromagnetic waves and have the highest frequency and shortest wavelength. They are produced by radioactive materials and can be dangerous and destructive but are also beneficial when they are used in radiation treatments to target and kill cancer cells.

"Have you ever woken in the middle of the night with the horrifying realization that you haven't the faintest idea what an electromagnetic wave is? [asks the author] Me neither. But since these waves are everywhere around us, I felt that it might be a good idea to find out." And he does.

The locomotion of worms, the "mucociliary escalator" that is inside your windpipe, or a "word" as Oliver Wendell Holmes describes it: "A word, whatever tone it wear, is but a trembling wave of air." Or guitars and sympathetic resonance, or breaking the sound barrier, or the Corryvreckan Maelstrom, or the electron microscope, Einstein, quantum physics and Luc De Broglie who won the 1929 Nobel prize in physics for figuring out the "wave behavior of elections." This is not nearly as boring as it probably sounds to most people. I found I could let go what I didn't understand and still enjoy this delightful, witty writer and his quirky curiosity.

At the end, he decides he needs to go to Hawaii on what he calls a "research trip" to study the huge surfing waves. And so into a world of boogie boards, body surfing, pipelines, death....

The author decides to try bodysurfing: "They were too fast for me to catch, and I felt foolish, frustrated and drained This was ridiculous. Who did I think I was kidding? I'm no bodysurfer, I thought to myself, spitting out yet another mouthful of salt water. And then I gave up worrying....."

OK, now look up viola d'amore. Vignettes like the one about the viola d'amore were what made this book such a treasure.

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