A Book of Waves—Stefan Helmreich (Durham, NC, USA: Duke Univ. Press, 2023, 411 pp.)

Abstract

The Oxford English Dictionary lists eight distinct meanings for the noun “wave” and 10 for the verb form. Physical phenomena of waves, as known by scientists and engineers, are ubiquitous and include those on water surfaces, in sound, seismology, clouds, electromagnetism, cosmic gravitational radiation, in sand, and so on. In the conventional technical sense, waves almost always have some mathematically stated connection between the wavelength (distance between crests), the phase speed (or frequency), and, sometimes, the amplitude. Various exceptions are known, including solitary waves (solitons) and shock waves. Often the waves are mere propagators of motion, but in other cases, they can transport material as well. With the evolution of the English language, the term “wave” has been invoked to describe a huge variety of phenomena ranging from waves of disease, disorder, and emotion, to hair (“permanent waves”), to crowd behavior in stadiums, to “waving” goodbye, to the World War II women's military WAVES, to the titles of novels—for example, from Virginia Woolf.