Why Are Waves So Hard to Grasp?
The Quanta Podcast
Quanta Magazine
4.7 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At first glance, studying the math of waves seems like it should be smooth sailing. But the equations that describe even the gentlest rolling waves are a mathematical nightmare to solve. On this week’s episode, host Samir Patel speaks with math staff writer Joseph Howlett why waves are so elusive, even in a simplified world of equations. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
Audio coda is "The Merry Golden Tree" by Shovel Dance Collective.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Bristol Channel in southwestern England has a huge tidal range, up to 40 feet sometimes, |
| 0:11.2 | and when it comes in, all of that water gets funneled up the estuary of the River Severn, |
| 0:18.2 | which snakes north and then west through the country, and a couple of times a month, when the conditions Severn, which snakes north and then west through the country. |
| 0:22.1 | And a couple of times a month, when the conditions are right, this tidal influx creates a |
| 0:27.3 | phenomenon called the Severn boar, a series of waves that actually push up the river 20 miles or more. |
| 0:35.5 | And when the boar is big, surfers can ride it for miles. |
| 0:39.6 | There are all sorts of strange waves happening out there in the ocean from giant rogue waves |
| 0:45.5 | and storm-driven white caps to gentle swells or the V of a boat's wake. |
| 0:52.0 | And we roughly know how they work. But it's a big mess in the ocean, as boat's wake, and we roughly know how they work. |
| 0:54.7 | But it's a big mess in the ocean, as you can imagine, and it's even messier than it seems |
| 0:59.9 | because at a mathematical level, even the most basic of wave patterns still do things we can't |
| 1:07.4 | anticipate. When it comes to understanding the math behind how waves work, |
| 1:12.0 | even under ideal circumstances, we're still a little lost at sea. |
| 1:22.4 | Welcome to the Quanta podcast where we explore the frontiers of fundamental science and math. |
| 1:27.0 | I'm Samir |
| 1:27.5 | Patel, editor-in-chief of Quantum Magazine. The reason, even the simplest waves are hard to describe, |
| 1:34.6 | boils down to the fact that fluid dynamics is hard mathematically, and no matter how clean the |
| 1:40.5 | equations might be, unpredictability always seems to creep in. But that doesn't mean that |
| 1:46.5 | mathematicians aren't working to bring some order to this chaos. Our math writer, Joe Howlett, |
| 1:53.2 | recently explored these waters in a story called The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves crashes into view, |
| 1:59.9 | and he's here with us today to talk about it. Welcome back to the show, Joe. Thanks for having me again, Samir. I love the Bristol Channel thing. It's such a Samir story. I was like somehow I knew that. Samir's going to know about some weird phenomenon somewhere in the world where waves move backwards. Like, it totally tracks. Fair enough, fair enough. Okay, so we always like to start by asking, what's the big idea? |
| 2:20.9 | What are we exploring today? The big idea is that waves are hard. It's a phenomenon that humans have |
... |
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