Austin Clarke’s luminous novel, written in vivid, hypnotic prose, reveals the dislocations of place and the nature of memory and the past. Two elderly Barbadian men, childhood friends who haven’t seen each other in fifty years, collide in a snowstorm on a Toronto street. In the warmth of a nearby bar, through the afternoon and into the night, they relate stories, exchange opinions, and share memories of a past in Barbados when, as children, neither could conceive any other place existed for them. As these two men confess to each other their innermost truths, their exploits and their love affairs, one tells the haunting story of a young Chinese woman, the other of the real reason for his visit to Toronto. Infused with pathos and humour, and with an affecting nostalgia for the idea of home, The Origin of Waves is a stunning and original novel by one of the country’s most gifted writers.

Fischer has examined price records in many nations, and finds that great waves of rising prices in the 13th-, 16th-, 18th-, and 20th centuries were all marked by price swings of increasing volatility, falling wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, and an increase in violent crime, family disintegration, and cultural despair. 109 graphs & charts. 7 maps.

Schrödinger's Universe: Einstein, Waves and the Origin of the Natural Laws Erwin Schrodinger (1937) perceived that the whole Universe, what we observe as material bodies and forces, are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. When he and Einstein debated the particle theorists led by Neils Bohr, most scientists thought they had lost it. This book shows they were right; that all matter is one Wave Structure in the space of the Universe. If the stars did not exist, we could not exist.

A biography of a staple grain we often take for granted, exploring how wheat went from wild grass to a world-shaping crop. At breakfast tables and bakeries, we take for granted a grain that has made human civilization possible, a cereal whose humble origins belie its world-shaping power: wheat. Amber Waves tells the story of a group of grass species that first grew in scattered stands in the foothills of the Middle East until our ancestors discovered their value as a source of food. Over thousands of years, we moved their seeds to all but the polar regions of Earth, slowly cultivating what we now know as wheat, and in the process creating a world of cuisines that uses wheat seeds as a staple food. Wheat spread across the globe, but as ecologist Catherine Zabinski shows us, a biography of wheat is not only the story of how plants ensure their own success: from the earliest bread to the most mouthwatering pasta, it is also a story of human ingenuity in producing enough food for ourselves and our communities. Since the first harvest of the ancient grain, we have perfected our farming systems to grow massive quantities of food, producing one of our species’ global mega crops—but at a great cost to ecological systems. And despite our vast capacity to grow food, we face problems with undernourishment both close to home and around the world. Weaving together history, evolution, and ecology, Zabinski’s tale explores much more than the wild roots and rise of a now-ubiquitous grain: it illuminates our complex relationship with our crops, both how we have transformed the plant species we use as food, and how our society—our culture—has changed in response to the need to secure food sources. From the origins of agriculture to gluten sensitivities, from our first selection of the largest seeds from wheat’s wild progenitors to the sequencing of the wheat genome and genetic engineering, Amber Waves sheds new light on how we grow the food that sustains so much human life.

This is a story of tides and coastlines, winds and waves, islands and beaches. It is also a retelling of indigenous creativity, agency, and resistance in the face of unprecedented globalization and violence. Waves Across the South shifts the narrative of the Age of Revolutions and the origins of the British Empire; it foregrounds a vast southern zone that ranges from the Arabian Sea and southwest Indian Ocean across to the Bay of Bengal, and onward to the South Pacific and the Tasman Sea. As the empires of the Dutch, French, and especially the British reached across these regions, they faced a surge of revolutionary sentiment. Long-standing venerable Eurasian empires, established patterns of trade and commerce, and indigenous practice also served as a context for this transformative era. In addition to bringing long-ignored people and events to the fore, Sujit Sivasundaram opens the door to new and necessary conversations about environmental history, the consequences of historical violence, the legacies of empire, the extraction of resources, and the indigenous futures that Western imperialism cut short. The result is nothing less than a bold new way of understanding our global past, one that also helps us think afresh about our shared future.

The historic detection of gravitational waves on September 14, 2015, prompted by the highly energetic fusion of two black holes, has made events in the universe "audible" for the first time. This expansion of the scientific sensorium has opened a new chapter in astronomy and already led to, among others, fascinating new insights about the abundance of black holes, the collision of neutron stars, and the origin of heavy chemical elements. The history of this event, which is epochal for physics, is reconstructed in this book, along with a walk-through of the main principles of how the detectors operate and a discussion of how the search for gravitational waves is conducted. The book concludes with an update of the latest detections and developments to date and a brief look into the future of this exciting research field. This book is accessible to non-specialist readers from a general audience and is also an excellent introduction to the topic for undergraduates in physics. Features: Provides an introduction to the historic discovery of gravitational waves Explains the inner workings of the detectors and the search to find the waves hidden in the data Authored by a renowned specialist involved in the ground-breaking discovery Hartmut Grote is a Professor of physics at Cardiff University, UK. His main expertise is in experimental gravitational-wave physics, and he has worked on building and improving gravitational wave detectors for over 20 years. From 2009 to 2017, he was the scientific leader of the British-German gravitational-wave detector: GEO600.