The Wavewatcher's Companion
by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Summary
It begins on a beach in Cornwall, with the author watching breakers with his young daughter and realising he cannot answer her simplest question about them, and it opens out from there into the most cheerfully obsessive book on this list: a field guide to waves, all of them, on the theory that once you start looking, everything undulates.
Ocean waves get their due, birth by storm, the long discipline of swell, why they break, the freaks that sink ships, and the surfers who read them like text. But the book's charm is its refusal to stop at water. Sound waves and the physics of music; light, and why the sky performs its colours; the Mexican wave and the mathematics of crowds; traffic jams travelling backward down motorways as waves of compression; the shock wave and the sonic boom; brain waves, radio waves, microwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum domesticated; even the peristaltic wave that moves lunch, which Pretor-Pinney tracks with the same delight as a Pacific swell. Each chapter is built from diversions, history, crank inventors, back of envelope physics, and jokes, and the physics is genuinely taught: by the end the reader owns wavelength, frequency, interference and resonance without ever sitting an equation.
The final chapter returns to the sea and earns its quiet: waves as the pattern under everything, matter itself included.
Around three hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who liked school physics better when it stayed home, and want wonder organised by a very funny obsessive.
Historical Context & Significance
The Wave Watcher's Companion won the Royal Society Winton prize in 2011, and its author's origin story is part of British publishing folklore: Gavin Pretor-Pinney, co founder of The Idler magazine, had founded the Cloud Appreciation Society as a half joke in 2005 and turned it into The Cloudspotter's Guide, a global bestseller; this was the sequel subject, clouds' restless cousins.
The win was a small statement about the prize's range, rewarding whimsy conducted with rigour in a year of heavyweight competition, and the judges' affection was widely shared: the book's method, amateur curiosity pursued until it becomes expertise, is the oldest tradition in British science writing, and reviewers enjoyed a winner with no laboratory in it.
The Cloud Appreciation Society meanwhile kept growing into the tens of thousands of members across dozens of countries, its founder becoming broadcasting's reliable voice for looking up; the wave book remains his most substantial, the joke taken furthest.