The Wave Watcher’s Companion

From Ocean Waves to Light Waves, via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves and All the Rest of Life's Undulations

Author: Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Category: Non-fiction Art / Illustrated Animals / Environment Other / General Science
Publisher: Bloomsbury (UK)/ Perigee (US)
Pub date: 7 June 2010
Length: 336 pages

About The Wave Watcher’s Companion

Author of THE CLOUDSPOTTER’S GUIDE, which sold more than 100,000 copies in UK hardback

winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Best Science Book 2011

When they roll up the beach and lap at our feet on seaside holidays, waves can feel like nature’s mantra. Their eternal repetition seems to clear the mind and bring our lives into perspective. Waves are also our main means of contact with the world around us, for everything we see and everything we hear reaches us in the form of light or sound waves.

Incorporating photographs, diagrams and illustrations, WAVES is a light-hearted and informative guide to the central role they play in our lives. It has a colour section in the middle as well as a ‘moving section’ – a set of web pages, designed to fit with and complement the book, showing waves in motion. And peppered throughout the book the reader will find occasional ‘experiments’, which couldn’t be further from the type if thing we did in science lessons at school! They are funny, revealing and sometimes ridiculous ways that the reader can experience the effects of waves at first hand.

We are all familiar with the siren of a speeding fire engine changing note as it passes by. This is due to the way sound waves are affected by movement. The same principle, when applied to light waves, reveals the distance of neighbouring galaxies.

‘Rogue’ waves at sea can reach well in excess of 100 feet. Though their formation is unclear, they are considered to be responsible for many major shipwrecks. A new method of interpreting satellite imagery suggests that around ten rogue waves are prowling our oceans at any one time.

A musical instrument known as the viola d’amore has six strings hidden below the fingerboard. These are neither plucked nor bowed like the normal strings, but vibrate in sympathy with them – ‘played’ by the sound waves from above. This resonance serves as a metaphor for love: one system set in motion by the vibrations of another.

About the Author

Gavin Pretor-Pinney is the author of THE CLOUDSPOTTER’S GUIDE, the inaugural publication of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which spent months in the UK top 10 bestseller lists. Aside from this, he is the co-founder and creative director of the Idler, a magazine now in its twelfth year and described variously as ‘the world’s finest periodical’ (Time Out) and ‘truly inspired’ (Sunday Telegraph). THE IDLER BOOK OF CRAP TOWNS was published in September 2003, spent months in the bestseller lists and spawned several equally successful follow-ups. In 1996 Gavin was responsible, along with three other partners, for starting the UK revival of the infamous alcoholic spirit absinthe, and was the first to import the drink into the UK after an eighty-year ban. Besides writing for Harpers & Queen and the Evening Standard, Gavin has co-presented a Channel 4 programme about Action Man and been assistant producer on another documentary about cocktails.

Conville & Walsh

literary agency