In his quest to find "the conductor", Steven Kotler takes us on a strike mission through surf, science and religion. This is how he describes a wave...My favorite part of the book:"The water that was roaring toward me was quite literally a memory. It started out in some other part of the world, forming when a change in temperature produced a change in pressure. Air's natural tendency is to move from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. We call this movement wind. When wind flickers across the ocean's surface, it produces small ripples which provide a greater surface area that can then catch more of that blowing wind. Eventually these ripples become larger and larger until they cohere into wavelets and eventually waves, attaining their greatest size when the come closest to matching the wind's speed. What makes this whole chain of events slightly stranger is that it is not the water itself traveling across the ocean as a wave, but merely the memory of the original wind's energy being constantly transferred as vibration from one neighboring water molecule to the next. When I heard the roar of that wave behind me at Nusa Dua, what I was actually hearing was the sound of the past arriving in the present with me directly in its path."
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