Gavin Pretor-Pinney on waves, at 5x15

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Gavin Pretor-Pinney on waves, at 5x15

14 Jun 2010

Speakers: Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a British designer and author, begins his talk with a discussion of waves; sound, infrared, micro, and, of course, the waves we find at the beach. He calls waves the ‘bedrock of our telecommunications age’, powering mobile phones, the internet, and wifi connections. He gives an enlightening list of unexpected waves; the peristaltic wave that allows us to breathe, the stop and go wave that causes traffic jams and curiously, Mexican waves that tend to go clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counter clockwise in the Southern. Waves are the ever present go-betweens that allow us to interpret the world but are rarely recognized; we have evolved not to notice the wave itself but to notice the information it carries.