In his remarkable memoir of his life chasing breaks in far-flung corners of the globe, Barbarian Days, the writer William Finnegan describes the “spooky duality” of waves, the way that, “when you are absorbed in surfing they seem alive. They each have personalities, distinct and intricate, and quickly changing moods, to which you must react in the most intuitive, almost intimate way – too many people have likened riding waves to making love. And yet waves are of course not alive, not sentient, and the lover you reach to embrace may turn murderous without warning.”
This idea of duality is difficult to avoid when thinking about waves. In them we see energy and matter collapse into each other, find fluidity with structure and form, and the eternal in the transient, apprehend both beauty and symmetry and violence and terror. Likewise, the physics of waves are simultaneously very simple and impossibly complex, the non-linear nature of fluid dynamics meaning they can remain relatively regular or combine without warning into rogue waves capable of sweeping people off rocks and sinking ships.
