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The Wave Watcher's Companion: Ocean Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life's Undulations
Gavin Pretor-Pinney
A playful, genuinely curious tour of waves in all their forms, from the bestselling author of *The Cloudspotter's Guide*. Gavin Pretor-Pinney starts with an idle afternoon at the shore and spirals outward to shock waves, brain waves, radio and microwaves, light waves, and the human "stadium wave" that ripples around a sports crowd, treating each as a variation on a single elegant idea — energy traveling through a medium without the medium going along for the ride. Written for the intelligent amateur rather than the physicist, it wears its science lightly, full of digressions, history, and the founder-of-the-Cloud-Appreciation-Society enthusiasm for noticing overlooked everyday phenomena. It's popular science as invitation to attention: once a reader starts watching for waves, they can't stop seeing them.
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The author
Gavin Pretor-Pinney is a British writer, designer, and cofounder of The Idler magazine who found unexpected fame as the founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society and author of the international bestseller The Cloudspotter's Guide. An Oxford graduate and self-described recovering science nerd, he specializes in reviving wonder at ordinary natural phenomena.
The book
The Wave Watcher's Companion (2010) is organized as an introduction, "Wavewatching for Beginners," followed by nine chapters that hop from ocean swells to the physics of light, gathering assorted wave concepts along the way.
How it reads
Breezy, digressive, and warm, closer to an enthusiast's guided ramble than a textbook. Its charm is also its limit: readers wanting rigorous physics will find the treatment impressionistic, while those wanting to be delighted into curiosity will be well served. The science is sound but deliberately kept light.
For more context
Pretor-Pinney's cloud books share the same sensibility and make natural companions.
Sources - The Wave Watcher's Companion — Penguin Random House - The Wave Watcher's Companion — Goodreads
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gavin Pretor-Pinney
- Publisher
- Perigee / Penguin
- Year
- 2010
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Science
- Location
- Colorado