Matthew Strassler, "Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean"

Video Description

In this book, 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. Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe. _______________________ Matt Strassler is a theoretical physicist, blogger, and writer whose research in particle physics and quantum field theory often takes him to the Large Hadron Collider. In recent years he has been an Associate of the Harvard University Physics Department. A former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, he was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Rutgers University. Greg Kestin earned his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University as a member of The Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, focusing on theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. He then joined the faculty of Harvard’s Physics Department as a College Fellow and Preceptor and is currently Associate Director of Science Education and Lecturer on Physics. He also worked at NOVA | PBS for nearly a decade, creating award-winning media, from documentaries to his original video series, What the Physics?! For more information and videos of Harvard Science Book Talks, see https://science.fas.harvard.edu/book-talks.