Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean

Longlisted for the 2025 PEN / EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Big Think’s Best Science Book of 2024 A theoretical physicist takes readers 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. Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe.